


Reading for Pleasure

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [265]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Angst, Bisexual Tony Stark, Blow Jobs, Crushes, Dirty Talk, Dirty Talking Steve Rogers, First Kiss, First Time, Gleeful Use of Romance Novel Tropes, Love Confessions, M/M, Metatextual Pining, Penetrative Sex, Period-Typical Attitudes, Pining, Schmoop, Secret Identity, Tony Writes Romance, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-02-27 03:27:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 22,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18730780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Being a romance novelist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Especially when Tony's best friend is also (unbeknownst) his muse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: I’m an artist who was at shit creek until I met you, so please be my muse, no, I’m not asking you out. Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

Being a romance novelist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Yeah, Tony can work in his pajamas if he wants to, or not at all--technically he’s already rich--but purple prose or not, writing is _hard_ , much harder than running a business, and his editor’s kind of a prick. Plus, no matter how well his books sell, no matter how quick they zip off the dimestore shelves, there’s the small problem of his damn pseudonym; a tool of necessity, sure, but fuck if it doesn’t eat him up some days that nobody knows Rosamund de Bloom is him. Other days, though, like when he spots Steve at the lunch counter, nose deep in _His Fevered Dream_ , he’s so very, very grateful.

Because Steve Rogers, All-American classic, war hero with blue eyes and arms that could dead-lift a tank, is not only his best friend in the whole sordid world, he’s also (unbeknownst) Tony’s muse. And the object of his never-ending and carefully closeted desire, but that’s a different circle of embarrassment hell than seeing Steve actually read one of the damn things.

“Hey,” Tony says, playing it nine kinds of cool. “Sorry I’m late.”

Steve looks up and gives him that sunlight bright grin. “‘S ok. Got a few pages in, anyway.”

“I didn’t know you read stuff like that.”

“Every now and then,” Steve says with a shrug, a tinge of pink on his cheek. “You know me. I’m not picky.”

Tony grabs the menu he has memorized and pretends to ponder pimento. “No, sure,” he says, “when it comes to words, Rogers, everybody knows that you’re easy.”

They’re Steve’s job, words. He’s a master of clear, clever copy. Sometimes he draws the ads, too; the military’s loss has been Madison Avenue’s gain. But still, in all the years Tony’s known him, he’s never seen a romance novel in Steve’s hand--much less one that Tony wrote, one that may or may not feature a hero with a barrel chest and big hands and a sweet touch in the bedroom that reduces the heroine to happy tears. And said hero may have dark hair and green eyes but in Tony’s mind as he was typing he may have been transcribing from Steve, from what he imagines Steve’s body looks like under his starched shirt and his slim ties, the way he uses his body in bed; not as a battering ram or a bully but as a patient, giving lover, the kind of man who’ll gladly ignore his own dick if it means melting the girl with his mouth until she’s soft cream and butter and feeling so goddamn good she coos when he sticks it in.

It isn’t always like that, when Tony writes for him, closes his eyes and lays his hands on the typewriter and lets Steve breathe through every page. Sometimes, like in _His Secret Treasure,_ Steve is a bully, the sort of brute who kisses the heroine first and asks permission later, who takes her hard the first time and gentler after, who falls in love with her with every impassioned encounter even though it wasn’t part of his plan. By the end, in stories like that, the hero is putty in the girl’s hands and he’s the one who sighs when she touches him, when he’s naked and she’s not and he comes with a wild, aching cry down her throat.

And sometimes, as in _His Endless Love_ , the Steve that Tony conjures on the page is much too close to the real one: a writer with a gorgeous smile, friendly and generous and kind to what for most men would be a fault. He’s funny and prone to bouts of drinking wine and he gets quiet when the war comes up, when he’s reminded of it, and lifts a glass to long-lost friends. He’s an open book, this hero; says what he’s thinking and thinks what he says even at two in the morning when Tony’s got insomnia and calls for solace or to see if Steve wants to come uptown for a drink.

“You have one,” Steve will say, yawning. “Just tell me what you’re pouring and I’ll live vicariously.”

Which will make Tony laugh because, hey, that’s what he does professionally, but even at two AM he’s got enough sense not to say that.

“You know what’s funny,” Steve says when his egg salad sandwich is gone, when Tony is crunching the last of his chips.

“Hmmm?”

Steve tugs _His Fevered Dream_ from his pocket and sets it on the counter, the lurid cover beaming up from Formica. “This, what I was reading before? It’s surprisingly good. Well-written, I mean.”

“Huh,” Tony says, ducking behind his cold as stone coffee. “That’s--really?”

“I know, I know. Surprised me, too. One of the secretaries was reading it and she recommended it.”

“She recommended--?”

“Yeah.” Steve chuckles. “I think she was trying to shock me or something. You know how the new girls can be.”

 _Swooning at your feet_? Tony thinks. His head feels a little green. _Hopeful? Throwing themselves at you nine ways to Sunday in hopes you’ll remember their name and/or propose marriage?_

There’d been one a couple years before who’d succeeded at both; she and Steve had been three months from the altar. But then the girl, Peggy, had reconnected with some childhood friend in Old Blighty, a long-lost love such and such, and one day she’d left the solitaire on Steve’s desk while he was in a meeting and taken a cab to the airport. It’d taken Tony months and way too much whiskey to pull Steve’s head out of his sorry ass. He had no desire to watch Steve go through that shit again. Even if _His Shattered Heart_ had been his biggest best-seller; people ate up that tragic hero-healed-by-love shit.

“I mean,” Steve says, counting quarters on the counter, “it’s a little bluer than I expected. A little heavier on the, uh, romance.”

“You mean the sex.”

That gets him a grin. “That’s what I meant, yes.”

“It’s a romance novel,” Tony says, tossing a fiver at the bill and pushing Steve’s money back at him. “What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know. It’s the first one I’ve ever read. But if they’re all like this de Bloom woman’s, it might not be the last.”

Having Steve declare his love might be a thing that Tony’s thought about forever. But he’d never considered what it might be like to have Steve say nice things about his words, his writing. Jesus, that’s hot. He coughs. Resists the urge to tug at his collar.

“They’re not,” Tony says quickly. “Like hers. She, ah, she’s got something different. An alternative perspective, or something. That’s what, um--that’s what I’ve heard.”

He has Steve’s full attention now, those blue eyes wide and curious. “You read this stuff, Tone?”

“Once or twice I have, yeah. Pepper does. She likes them. She, you know. She keeps me informed.”

“ _Pepper_ reads these? Oh, come on. Your Pepper. Pepper Potts.”

“Yes, she does.” _Only when I beg her to copyedit._ “Why is that so surprising?”

Steve gives him a look, laughs. “Because she’s a lady of the take-no-crap variety. I have a hard time imagining her doing anything so frivolous, even if you paid her.”

“Yes, well,” Tony bluffs, “maybe you don’t know her as well as you think.”

“Maybe,” Steve says as they slide off the stools and head out into the hot summer sun, “I should call her up and ask her which one of these I should read next.”

“No!” Tony says a little too loudly, gratefully suddenly for the sounds of the street. “I wouldn’t. She’s working on logistics for the shareholders’ meeting next week. She doesn’t like to be interrupted. You know how she gets.”

Steve blinks at him. “Tony, I was kidding.”

“You were?” Shit. “Of course you were. I was humoring you, Rogers. That was me playing along. Geez.”

Steve claps him on the shoulder, his big hand hot through blended seersucker. “I’ll keep her secret safe, don’t worry. Scout’s honor. I won’t tell anyone she condones reading for pleasure.”

File under words Tony needs to hear Steve say again, pronto, and in stereo: _pleasure_. “Uh,” he says. “Wise choice on your part.”

“You’re still up for drinks tomorrow, yeah? My place. The game’s on.”

“The game?” Steve’s still holding his shoulder. It’s hard to think.

“Hello, Tony. The Dodgers?” And now Steve’s smiling. Not helping. “The Cubs? Remember those guys?"

Oh, baseball. Right. Professional balls and sticks. “Yep," Tony says, remembering how to nod. "I’ll be there. With bells on.”

“Ok. First pitch is at four.” Steve gives him a shake, a quick wave. “Four o’clock, Tony. You get there at five after and I might not let you in.”

 _His Teasing Promise_ , Tony thinks as Steve walks away, weaves his way through the thinning afternoon crowd. Or _His Loving Threat_. Huh. That wasn’t bad.


	2. Chapter 2

All things considered, Tony figured as he thought about it later, he was damned lucky that it’d taken Steve this long to get within spitting distance of his secret.

Six years, they'd known each other, since they’d run into each other in the elevator of the Stark Building. Tony had been sneaking in late and Steve had been on his way to an interview at Stays & Rochester: hungover meets spit-and-polish. Tony had fumbled Steve his business card and Steve had babbled nervously about his fear of being unqualified and it had all worked out rosy when Stays had been smart enough to sign him from his samples on the spot.

“Hey,” Steve had said on the other end of Tony’s private line, “Mr. Stark, it’s Steve. Steve Rogers? I owe you a drink.”

He hadn’t owed Tony anything, of course; all he’d done was listen to a stranger who was trapped in a small box with him as they sailed up 20 floors. Didn’t exactly make Tony a hero. But Steve still smelled of the Seine and carried the shadow of the war behind his smile; anybody with two eyes could see that. So what was the harm in letting this incredibly attractive man buy him a drink?

He’d been hoping for more, if he was honest. He’d been hoping that, in his blurry morning stupor, he’d missed The Look, and that he’d get it that night in stride.

He hadn’t.

But he had, in the most unlikeliest ways, gained a friend.

Steve was the kind of guy who always remembered Tony’s birthday. He had amazing phone manners (much to Pepper’s perpetual delight) and held doors for every lady and was never more than five minutes from his next smile. No wonder women flipped out over him; that, if he’d wanted, Steve’s dance card could have been perpetually full--but he wasn’t that kind of guy. No, fundamentally, deep down in the ocean of his soul, Tony learned, Steve was the epitome of the one-woman guy. He was waiting for love, the roses and fresh champagne kind, and no matter how many bullet bras made beelines for him, how many girls tried to get fresh with him on a date, he was bound and determined, Steve Rogers, to put off the whole business until he found that one girl who was perfect for him and he for she and until then, he’d told Tony for years, he was more than content to warm the bachelor’s bench.

It’d been that which roused Tony’s muse--not Steve’s body or his beautiful face, but his never-ending, semi-sickening faith in the power of love. He’d been writing gaudy fiction since ‘39, Tony had, just as an on-and-off thing. It helped his head to have someplace to go that wasn’t full of blast ratios and kill rates and his board’s laughter every time he mentioned his preference for peace.

“Your father,” one of the old roosters had said just after Hitler began gutting Poland, after the War Department had put its fist to Stark Industries’ door, “would’ve killed for times like these, boy. This company’s never had it so good.”

They’d known how to keep him in line, his board, and it had worked for a long time, their summoning ghosts. He’d numbed himself with booze and sex and the occasional burst of words from his typewriter, short stories a la Hemingway or Poe that never went any damn where. Oh, they got published now and then in pulp magazines, maybe, and there was a thrill that came from seeing his ridiculous fake name-- _Nicholas Fury--_ in print. But that thrill never lasted much longer than a fifth fresh from the package store, and the hangover was almost as bad. Still, it helped him dull his conscience and limp all the way to ‘44. But when he caught wind of the Bomb, of what lay in store for the innocents labeled as enemies, he knew he couldn’t wait any longer; he was down to the last shreds of his soul.

So he’d sold his stake and kicked the board and its blood money out of his father’s building and started thrashing around for a new way of life.

It was Pepper, his secretary-cum-drill sergeant, who’d suggested he create a foundation. A charity of sorts, she’d said, that would help rebuild the world that Stark Industries had helped the armies of the world almost annihilate. And (she implied with an eyebrow, a pointed look at the state of his person) it would be good the shaggy state of his conscience, too.

So when he’d met Steve in that elevator in 1946, he’d climbed aways back towards feeling human. He’d stopped pickling himself with liquor and stuck with the occasional attempt to drown. He’d kept writing. Switched to sci-fi. But he still wasn’t happy, still felt like something in his life, no matter how much tangible good he and his money were now doing, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And then he’d run into a genuine nice guy with broad shoulders and perfect teeth and accidentally, beautifully, found his muse.

They hadn’t been friends more than a month before Tony’s fingers started itching, before the sight of Steve’s head thrown back in laughter or his thighs spread or the look on his face in the streetlight when they were searching for a cab made something in him ache to reach out and touch. And it scared him.

The dreams didn’t, though: the long, flimy ones where Steve kissed him, cupped Tony’s face in those big, knowing hands and licked teasingly at his lips. The ones where Steve pushed him face first into a field full of flowers and traced the curves of his ass with his fingers. The ones where Tony was on his back, Steve wearing the moon above him and whimpering as he eased his cock in gently, splitting Tony open while he whispered words of gossamer and never took his eyes from Tony’s face.

So he took refuge in words again, his sacred space; filled page after page with men who acted like Steve and felt like Tony and always got their happily ever after, the end. They spilled beyond stories, these tales, and tumbled over into books and the day he came into the office to find Pepper holding an envelope from Heyer and Sons Publishers was one of the strangest and most goddamn delightful of his life.

“ _His Loving Touch_?” Pepper had said, wrinkling her nose at the bourbon Tony’d poured. “Please tell me this one’s not about aliens.”

“It’s called a romance novel, Pep."

Pepper squinted at the letter in his hand and took a long, careful sip. “You’re writing romance. For women. Like those  _Love Stories_ comic things?”

“Like that, but no pictures.” He beamed at her over his glass, at the rainbows the afternoon sun was shooting through the crystal. “All words. My words.”

The look she gave him was all sass. “You honestly think women will want to read what Tony Stark has to say about love?”

“It’s not just me who thinks it,” Tony said, waggling that blessed piece of paper in the air. “So does Heyer and Sons.”

Later, when the decanter was nearly empty and Pep’s hair was headed out of its chignon, she said: “Is this a thing we tell people, or is this strictly under wraps?”

Tony nuzzled the bare turn of her shoulder. “They call it a pseudonym for a reason, don’t they? Far as I’m concerned, Rosamund de Bloom is nobody’s business but mine.”

“Ours.”

“Hmm?”

She sat up a little, her long legs half tumbling from his slim office couch. “If it starts pulling your attention away from your actual job which actual people depend on you to do, then it's actually just as much my business as yours.”

He snorted. “Pep, it’s a side deal. A lark.”

Pepper laughed and slid to her feet, stretched her arms above her head far and wide. “Tony, I hate to tell you this, I do, but in all the years we’ve known each other, I’ve never seen you happier than when you’re doing one thing.”

Tony grinned, a pointed one he aimed at the damp curls he’d so recently worshipped. “God, I hope not.”

“Tsk. No, you idiot. You’re never happier than when you’re writing. It’s your thing, Stark. The thing you were put on this crazy world to do. Anybody with two eyes can see it, the way you talk about it.”

Tony blinked. “You’re the only person I talk about it to. You know that.”

She rolled her eyes and put a knee back on the couch; leaned down and gave him a soft, friendly kiss that meant the afternoon’s entertainment was done. “Exactly,” she said after a minute. “You ever think maybe you should change that? How can anybody really know you unless you show them this side of yourself?"

"And that," he'd said to himself after she'd left, leaving the sunset and one last glass of bourbon behind, "is exactly, Miss Potts, why I don't."


	3. Chapter 3

“So,” Steve says on Saturday, when the game’s in a rain delay and they’re sweating bullets on Steve’s terrible couch. “Strangest thing happened to me today.”

“Yeah?” Tony sits up with a wet stretch. They’re peeled down to their undershirts and Steve has a fan going and they still might as well be perched in an oven

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I guess you could kinda call it deja vu. Or some second cousin of it, anyway.” He reaches down and and plucks something from under the couch. “Because I’ve never gotten it before from a book.”

And not just any book, apparently. Steve’s holding _His Shattered Heart_.

“Really?” Tony says, strangled. “Another one of those? What, did the secretary lend you her whole stack?”

Steve blinks. “No, I bought this one. Miss Maximoff recommended it after I tore through that first one.”

“She recommended--!"

“Yeah,” Steve says, apparently oblivious to Tony’s internal semi-combustion. “She got teary-eyed talking about it and said she was sorry, but she couldn’t lend me her copy.” His mouth lifts. “She said she, quote unquote, loves it too much.”

“Huh,” Tony says, suddenly grateful to the damnable heat, to still air that Steve’s sad little fan’s barely able to stir. That plus the beer means that his red goddamn cheeks are de rigueur. “Women.”

“So I bought this at the drugstore on the way home last night and cracked it open this morning and that’s when I, well--” Steve starts flipping pages. “I read this line, and it just--hang on, let me...Ah, here it is.” He clears his throat, reads:

> _She stood in the open doorway of his arms, her own thrown around his neck, and it was only a moment before that doorway closed, before he was holding her as tightly against him as he had on that other, mad night. But here they stood not skin to skin but with the eyes of the passing public upon them, little murmurs that, by nightfall, would have reached her father’s ears back at Brighthall. This would not do, her mind told her, a mad rabbit racing about in her skull, it would not do and yet to let him go now would seem like she were giving permission for him to make good on his threat, on the one-way ticket clutched in his hand, and leave her side and that of England forever and ever, his departure the worst sort of amen._

Hearing his own words come out of Steve’s mouth is horrifying. It’s glorious. It’s the best damn thing Tony has ever heard in his life and truth be told he can barely hold back his delight. He remembers writing those sentences, the visceral feeling of the cigarette in his teeth, of the tips of his fingers sliding over smooth typewriter keys. The room had been dark and the world asleep and it was one of those few times, those rare times when the words emerged before he’d thought them, when they spilled like loose ink from his hands and made their neat home, line after line, on the page. And to hear them loose again, this time in Steve’s voice, his beautiful, earnest cadance, makes something in Tony shake, an earthquake. But he can’t say that, can’t even give Steve a whiff, could he? So he goes for sarcasm instead.

“I’m not getting any deja from this vu, Rogers,” he says, tapping the bottle’s lip against his. “What is it I’m supposed to be hearing?”

The tips of Steve’s ears go pink. “Sorry, I got--I was trying to give you some context, I guess, because it doesn’t...let me finish.”

“Whatever floats your boat, kid.”

“Um,” Steve says, “so, ah, it goes--”

> _She knew now the power of his body, how it felt to be covered by it. How gentle he could be at the heights of her passion; how hard he’d tried to be so at the apex of his own. How beautiful it had been when he failed, when he turned his mouth against her throat and groaned and filled that secret part of her with his passion and the soft promise of life. He loved her, she knew that now, no matter what path he chose; rake or gentleman, ruffian or husband, he would always be hers._
> 
> _And for one sunlight-soaked moment, she thought that she alone was reason enough for him to stay._
> 
> _But then his hand found her face and his tear struck her cheek and she knew in that awful moment that she was wrong. She wasn’t enough._
> 
> _His voice found her ear, soft and terribly, terribly sad. “I’d say that I don’t love you, Cam, but that would be a lie.”_

Steve stops reading and looks up, his face folded into an odd sort of origami. “That line. That’s the one that did it.”

_Well shit_. Tony’s grip on his beer bottle slipped. “You, ah--?”

“That’s what Peggy said to me. The last thing. The last night we were together. We’d just, you know, and she was getting ready to leave and she sat back down on the bed and kissed me and said that exact thing.”

“Huh,” Tony says. “Well.”

“I told you that, didn’t I? I could’ve sworn that I had, just to try and get the damn things out of my head. God, I’ll never fucking forget it.”

“Yeah, you might’ve. It sounds vaguely familiar.”

Steve looks away. There was sweat on his jaw, sweat pooling in the well of his throat. “See, now I can’t help but wonder--”

Tony’s heart stutters to a stop. Oh god, he thinks, seeing his whole life flash before him, a near-death experience that’ll have to end, surely, with Steve throwing him out of his house. “Wonder what?”

“If this is where she got those words, that line. I mean, bad enough to think it was something she felt in that moment, you know, something she for some reason decided to say, but god, Tony, if she got them from this book--!” He turns back, his eyes like blue bruises. “That feels cold, you know? Almost as if she was treating me like something that wasn’t real. Like she didn’t even bother coming up with her own way of brushing me off; she just nicked Rosamund de Bloom’s."

Tony wants to say something about the collective unconscious, about the vagaries of language having only so many words strung together in so many combinations, but he’s afraid that if he opens his mouth right then, staring into Steve’s wounded face, what would come out, fuck it all, was the unvarnished truth: _No, I stole that line from her, goddammit, from you crying the words into my whiskey the night after she left_ _and the whole fucking book you’re holding in your hands, it sprang to life just from that line, from the look on your face when you told me, because god help me, Steve Rogers, you deserve a happy ending and since I can’t give it to you in real life, my friend, on paper is as good as I’ve got._

So he nods instead and pats Steve on the shoulder and gets up to snag them both beers.

When he comes back, the book’s gone. Steve’s turned the radio up. Still no ball in Chicago; thunderstorms coming in off the lake.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says when Tony presses the cold bottle into his hand. “I shouldn’t have laid all that on you.”

Tony feels a twinge. Fuck, he’s the asshole in this little scenario, and it’s Steve who’s apologizing. Of course it is. “It’s ok,” he manages. “I’m sorry that happened.”

Steve smiles at him. “Me, too. I’ll let you know if it was worth it.”

“Huh?”

“Well,” Steve says. “You know. After I finish the book.”

Tony trips over his own feet and falls back on the couch. “You’re, ah. You’re gonna keep reading it?”

“Well, yeah.” Steve raises his eyebrows. “I can’t just leave Cam and Drummond like that, can I? Separated and heartbroken. There’s enough of that shit in real life.”

Later, when Steve gets up to hit the head, Tony tugs the book from the grip of dust bunnies and turns to page 127, picks up where Steve had left off:

> _“I--” Cam began, but Drummond shushed her. Shook his head_ no _._
> 
> _“When I’m gone,” he murmured. “When you’re alone. Say it for me then.”_
> 
> _She sniffled; there was no point in hiding her grief. “But you won’t be with me to hear.”_
> 
> _“But I’ll know.” He lifted his head from her shoulder and touched her face, his mouth curled in a small, shattered smile. “Always, I’ll know. And I promise you, my darling--I’ll never forget.”_

And neither, Tony thinks unhappily, shoving his shame back where it belonged, will Steve, I bet.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference, friends, I've revised the previous chapter a wee bit; no substantive changes, but ones designed to soothe my own inner Rosamund de Bloom.

He walks through the next few days in a daze, too busy self-flagellating to think about work, about the hands he should be shaking, about the trip to Washington coming up in a week. Pepper’s in a tizzy about it--not that you’d know from looking; not one ginger strand dares to fall out of place--fussing after him and putting things in front of him to sign and protesting when he orders lunch in day after day.

“What happened to Captain Rogers?” she says on Wednesday, arms folded in his office doorway. “Is he out of town or something?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

She tilts her head, looks pointedly at his shoes propped on the desk. Hey, it’s his desk. “You two have a tiff? You haven’t called him all week.”

He rolls his eyes at the ceiling. “ _No_ , Pep.”

“Oh, Tony,” she says, the voice of the all-knowing. “What the hell did you do?”

“Not a goddamn thing.” He drops his gaze, glares. “And I don’t appreciate you presuming I did. Maybe Steve screwed something up, huh? Why do you assume it was me?”

She laughs, throws back her head and really goes at it, so hard that her shoulder slips where it’s pressed against the doorframe. “Why and how,” she says, “you actively choose to forget that I can see straight through your bullshit, I will never know. I assume it’s some self-preserving amnesia. Which I’m grateful for, don’t get me wrong, because otherwise you’d probably freak out and send me packing.”

“Ugh,” Tony says, because it’s the best answer he’s got. Because she’s right. Because she’s always fucking right.

“For an occasional drunk and one-time dilettante, you’re very Catholic in your guilt, you know that?” Pepper chuckles and settles in the chair opposite. “But then, I can’t think of a single thing that you do halfway.”

He covers his face with his palms and takes a deep, _I desperately need a cigarette_ breath. “I made a mistake a few years ago, Pep, a bad one, and it’s just bitten me hard in the ass.”

He hears the slide of a soft pack, the snap of a lighter. “You wanna talk about it?”

Tony shakes his head and holds out a hand; she slides a cig between his fingers. “In simplest terms? I stole something kind of precious and awful.”

“From Captain Rogers, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah.” He takes a long drag, then another, watches her face fade in and out of the smoke. “Sort of."

He walks through the whole stupid mess for her, lays out the newfound perils of his double life. He’s never told anyone how he feels about Steve, and even with Pep, he can’t quite find the right words. But he stumbles around, fumbles through it, and her expression says that he’s gotten close enough. If there’s a hardening around her mouth, a stoic sort of set to her eyes, he only notices it later when he thinks back on it, hears himself saying something awkward like _I really care about Steve_.

She lets him get through it, though, without interrupting, even when there’s less talk than flail, and when he’s finished, the ashtray empty and his tie loosened, she holds her tongue for a long time.

“You have to tell him,” she says finally, her long red nails spread on his desk. “At this point, I don’t think you’ve got a choice.”

Tony winces. “Peggy isn’t something we talk about, Pep. It's kind of our 11th Commandment. And there’s a reason for that. You should have seen his fucking face the other day when he--”

“Not about Peggy, genius. I mean, you have to tell him about you. How you feel about him, and all that. The Rosamund de Bloom stuff can come later.” She chuckles and bends her lips around a smoke ring. “If he’ll still speak to you, that is.”

“No.” God, Tony thinks, is she hearing herself?! “Absolutely fucking no! I can’t do that!”

Pepper eyed him across the mahogany. “So you’d rather he keep reading your stuff--not knowing that it’s your stuff--and run the risk of him stumbling across some other bon mot of his that you lifted or some hot-water description of a leading man’s chest that might as well have _Steve Rogers_ stamped on it?”

Tony gnaws on the filter, his fingers clawing a little at the air. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“Sure it is.” She smiles. “I mean, I barely know the guy and I saw it.”

“You what?”

“Tony,” she says in that long-suffering, _I work for an idiot_ way. “Come on. You spent years banging away at middling-to-fair pulp stuff and then you get buddy-buddy with Captain Rogers and suddenly your writing reads as, oh, dare I say it, inspired? Not to mention your subject flipping from murders and spaceships to moonlight and rainbows.” Her mouth lifts again, a little brittle this time; something, Tony thinks, that says sad. “Took me awhile to put two and four together, you know, but I did. And Steve will too, if he keeps working his way through your catalogue. He knows you almost as well as I do. So you do have a choice, I guess: you can tell him yourself, or let Rosamund de Bloom do it. It’s up to you.”

But his brain’s still stuck in one place, like a gearshift that won’t budge. “You _knew_?”

She stands up, a lovely elegant arch, and plucks her lighter from his hand, smooths her palm over the face of his desk--a face, he suddenly remembers in gaudy Technicolor, that he’s made love to her on more than once. “Yes,” she says, “and maybe this time, a word of advice? Be kind to the captain. Don’t let it come as a surprise.”

 

****

That night, he sits in his study hiding in a bottle, seeing Pepper’s face again, her sudden stiff upper lip, hearing the words on the page in Steve’s voice:

_I’d say that I don’t love you, but that would be a lie._

He doesn’t realize he’s reaching for the phone until he hears the operator’s voice, his own answering back, and when the line opens on the other end and hears Steve’s rough _hello_ , he jumps.

“Hey,” he says, tongue fumbling over good scotch. “Steve. It’s Tony.”

There’s a pause, a dozen heartbeat-long silence.

“Tony. I was just about to call you.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Something’s happened, something kind of--yeah.” A low exhale of breath. “Can I come over? We need to talk.”


	5. Chapter 5

It’s nearly an hour before the bell rings, before Tony flings open the front door to find Steve’s clothes rumpled and his face set like stone.

“Hey,” Tony says, his booze-soaked nerves suddenly back in a tizzy. “You made it.”

That gets him eye contact if not any actual words, but hey, it’s one AM. He’ll take it.

Steve steps over the threshold and closes the door with a quiet click sock and trails behind silently as Tony wanders back to the library, chewing nails and swallowing some serious fucking panic.

“So,” Steve says at last, sliding his hand into his coat, “this came in the mail on Monday.” He hands over a letter that’s slim and foreign-looking; it’s wearing the wrong kind of stamps. It’s been slit open with a knife neatly. There are two pale blue pages inside.

Tony stares at it the neat creases, the shadows of ink beneath them. “What is it?"

“Read it.”

He looks up. Steve’s not joking. That stone has turned to steel.

“Go on,” Steve says. “Read.”

_Dear Steve,_ it starts:

> _I suspect that this note will be unwelcomed, and deservedly so. The nature of our parting--of my leave-taking, shall we say--was unacceptably cruel. If it gives you any comfort, please know that the life I have found her, the happy one to which I thought I was running, has proven itself to be anything but. The man I loved as a child has, it seems, chosen to remain one; despite his promises, the life he would have me lead here is not the one we agreed upon. Nor is it the one that I want._
> 
> _What I want, I have discovered after these years in what feels like Purgatory, is you, my darling. It’s you. I look down at the hand on which my husband’s ring sits as I write this and what I see, what I feel in its stead is the ring that you gave me, the one I so joyfully accepted, the one I set aside so abruptly. Of all the foolish things I’ve done in my life, leaving you, Steve, and coming here is my biggest regret._
> 
> _This is an unfair missive. I recognize that. I have no doubt that it will hurt you. But know that I love you, my darling; despite all my foolishness, I have never stopped. And in a fortnight’s time, on June 27th, my husband and I will be arriving in New York for a month’s stay. Should you be willing to remake our acquaintance, my arms will be open to you._
> 
> _Write me back and let me know, please, unless I have offended you horribly. In that case, please burn this and forget you ever laid eyes on these words._
> 
> _Yours always,_
> 
> _Peggy_

“Jesus,” Tony says. The letter’s shaking in his hands. “Jesus christ, Steve.”

“We were just talking about her, weren’t we? I haven’t said her name in years and then I do and then--” Steve takes a deep breath, something in his shoulders deflating. “It’s like I summoned her or something. That’s what it feels like.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? None of this is your fault.”

_For reminding you of her_ , Tony thinks. _For stealing your greatest moment of pain and painting roses around it, putting it out in the world for other people to read. For--_

“I’m sorry this has happened,” he gets out. “All of it. It’s a hell of a thing.”

Steve shakes his head. “I haven’t--it’s been eating me up for days, Tone. I can’t think, I can’t eat, I can’t wrap my head around it at all, you know?”

“Well, you haven’t burned it, obviously. Does that mean you’re gonna write back?”

“I don’t know!” Steve’s voice is bright suddenly, sharp, a lightning bolt looking for ground. “I don’t fucking know! That's why I came over here! I need your help.”

His eyes are tuned into Tony’s now, pleading, and it’s like having a goddamn knife stuck in his chest because Steve does not look like this, Steve has his shit together, Steve has life by the horns and he’s let time heal his heart except he hasn’t, has he, if he’s handing Tony all this? If he was over her, well and truly, he’d have laughed at this shit, maybe gotten made about it, and then turned it to ash with his Zippo and brushed it off, Tony none the fucking wiser. But he’s kept it, hasn’t he, kept it and reread it and gotten so tangled in his head that he’s reaching out to Tony for advice--Tony, who’s never said _I love you_ out loud, never promised anyone anything farther out than five minutes, never actually contemplated the concept of forever outside of his books. Except that he’s in love with Steve, has been for goddamn ages, and what hurts worse than seeing Steve torn up by the prospect of reuniting with the love of his life is the notion that Tony will never be man enough to say how he feels, will he, even with Pepper’s admonition-- _You have no other choice_ \--biting frantically at his heels. And now, especially now, watching Steve be slowly crushed by the prospect of reignited love, the possibility of a few stolen moments with another man’s wife, he hates himself for it, Tony does, for his cowardice in talking; for a writer, he’s terrible with spoken words, and there’s not enough whiskey in the world to fix that.

“What does you gut say about all this?”

“My gut?”

“Yeah,” Tony says, leaning back a little, letting the pages float on his knees. “What was your first instinct when you read this? Your initial reaction?”

Steve’s cheeks bloom like cherry blossoms. “Honestly? To call you.”

Tony blinks. “Uh. Huh. Then why didn’t you?”

Steve shuffles his feet, leans too much of his weight on the back of the chair and it teeters, protesting. “It’s, ah. Well.”

“What?”

“It was selfish. You don’t...you’ve got bigger stuff to worry about than--”

“Than you?” Tony says. “I doubt it.”

Steve’s eyes come up from the carpet. “Seriously, Tone.”

“Seriously, Steve. You’re my best friend, ok? That’s what best friends do: treat each other like the lonely hearts column, when necessary. Though you’d probably have better luck asking Pep. I’m not really an expert in affairs of the heart.” _Except the fictional kind_.

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Sell yourself short." The corners of his mouth curve. "You know plenty. And I trust you, you have to know that. More than anybody.”

Tony’s heart does not do a wobbly forward roll. It doesn’t. Never mind that he feels like more of an asshole than ever; god, if only he’d come clean on Saturday, when Steve was waving _His Shattered Heart_  around. If he’d just said, _Hey, funny story. Guess whose words you’re holding?_ If only he’d said, _I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put her words in fictional words mouth and I only did it because I’m madly fucking in love with you and I’d rather have you hate me for who I am than think I’m somebody that I’m not_ \--

Wait. He didn’t think that. He’s just heard it.

From Steve, who’s on his knees in front him; Steve, who’s swept Peggy’s letter from his lap and whose hands, big and broad and shaking, are cupping Tony’s calves nervously.

“It’s ridiculous,” Steve says, “and it’s bordering on crazy, I get that, but it’s been haunting me for months now, the way I feel about you, and when I read her letter, the first thing I thought of was how much of a jerk I’ve been to you all this time by not just putting it out there, you know, and letting you decide whether it was something you”--he swallows--“whether you’d still be ok being my friend.”

“What the hell,” Tony says, because hey, maybe he’s dreaming. “Rogers, what the hell are you talking about?”

“This,” Steve says, very softly, swooping. “Tony. Just this.”


	6. Chapter 6

And then Steve’s mouth is on his, hot and uncertain, those broad hands curling up his legs and tucking themselves around Tony’s thighs and Tony feels pinned, too big for his body, his fingers frozen in mid-air.

“Oh,” Steve says against his lips, his grip loosening, his voice shaking. “Oh, god, Tony, I’m sorry, I--”

And then it’s like a switch has been flipped, some ancient level turned, because Tony’s got a hold of those arms, the twin tree trunks penning him in, and he’s surging up and he’s licking the unsteadiness from between Steve’s beautiful lips; like rose petals crushed, the things are, soft and wet and open for him now, making way for a great, needy noise to rise out of Steve’s throat as their mouths rise and slide and whimper and fall.

“Tony,” Steve murmurs again and again, each time full of more wonder. “Tony. Ah, god, Tony.”

It’s like a dream, touching Steve; stroking the back of his neck and palming his chest, clutching at the soft straw of his hair. And Steve touching him--kneading at his hip and nuzzling his neck, nipping gently at his mouth--is almost impossible to believe.

“You’re so beautiful,” Steve whispers, his fingers slipping between Tony’s legs, to the heat there, the sudden, perfect ache. “I can’t believe I’ve never told you before.”

There are smart words in Tony’s head-- _You can tell me now, gorgeous. I’m listening_ \--but they’re stuck there like ants slugging through honey, casualties of Steve’s caresses, of his exquisite sweetness, of the bourbon turn of his tongue inside of Tony’s mouth, of his soft happy sigh when Tony throws his arms around Steve’s neck and holds him close.

“I think about you all the time.” Steve’s voice is crystal now, rainbows struck. His whole body’s vibrating. “I think about holding you in my arms like this. I think about kissing you here and here, like this. I feel about petting you right here, where you’re hottest, and feeling you get stiff under my fingers, feeling you get hard under my hand.” His lips slide to Tony’s ear. “And I’ve thought about telling you how I feel, or touching you like this, and having you run away. You’re not going to run away, are you?”

“No,” Tony says hoarsely. “Hell no.”

Steve shudders and Tony tightens his grip, tightens; tries to keep this miracle of miracles, this man who adores him, grounded to the earth.

“Steve,” he says, somehow, “I love you. I always fucking have. You’re not gonna chase me away.”

“Always?”

No sense hiding it now. “Practically from the moment we met.”

When Steve’s mouth finds his again, there’s a tenderness there that makes Tony’s hair stand on end; each sweep of Steve’s tongue is a caress.

“Baby,” Steve says. Rougher now, like he can’t be bothered to get a full breath. “Baby. God, come here.”

Then they’re on the floor, Tony is, swept from the chair as if from a mad wave and his back pressed into the carpet, an old Turkish number his mother bought on her honeymoon and that Steve seems determined to defile. At least, that’s what his smile says as he opens his shirt and peels out of the slim cotton beneath. He does the same to Tony, all kinds of pleasant yanking, and then they’re skin to skin, stretched out in front of a silent hearth and generating their own kind of flame.

_We should be talking_ , Tony thinks, sliding his hands up Steve’s back, teasing the rise of his spine. There’s too much he doesn’t know, too much I haven’t said. Letting him make love to me like this without spilling the beans--it feels like the coward’s way out.

But it feels too good to stop, too good to be held down by the man that he loves, Peggy’s letter crumpled under his head, and have that man’s mouth on his nipples, sucking and biting and sucking again until Tony is jelly from his, his dick hard and his voice loud and his nails in Steve’s shoulders, the steady beat of Steve’s hips enough to drown out any whisper of conscience Tony has left.

“I want to put my mouth on you,” Steve says, all tongue and sharp teeth. “I want to kiss you between your legs, baby. Will you let me do that?”

“Yes,” Tony says once, a dozen times, a long, greedy chorus that peaks only when he’s open, when Steve’s peeled him open and sent his trousers flying. “Yes, yes, yes. Please.”

And then he’s powerless, punched, delirious, because Steve is lapping the dew from the the top of his cock, his eyes locked on Tony’s face, and dear god, what a picture he makes, Tony’s best friend, mouthing at Tony’s hard cock with his hair in his eyes.

“Steve. _Steve_.”

He reaches up and Steve reads him, loud and clear like headlines on newsprint.

“Yeah?” Steve says, hot air against the line of his shaft. “Is that what you want?” His fingers slip down, rub firm against Tony’s entrance, the soft promise of breach. “You wanna be inside me?” He kisses the tug of Tony’s balls. “Or do you want me inside you?”

Whatever comes out of Tony’s mouth isn’t a thought, it’s a feeling, a vocal expression of an awful, beautiful ache.

Another rub, another teasing lick. “You’re so tight here.” There’s awe in Steve’s voice, a stretched timbre of need. “So tight, honey. So pretty.”

“Oh, fuck.”

That gets him a tip of Steve’s finger, a low, hungry suck; those blue eyes lost again in his own. “Tell me you want me inside you, Tony.”

“I want you.” God, he can’t breathe. “Steve, please.”

“What do you want?” Steve nuzzles the inside of his thigh. “Tell me.”

“I want you to take me.”

Steve moans. Tony’s dick jerks. “God, say that again."

“Take me.” He has one hand in Steve’s hair, the other teasing the curls around his own cock. “I want you to fuck me, baby. Right here."

“Yeah?”

Tony touches Steve's face, the lovely, heated curves of it, the plush wet sink of his mouth. "I need you," he says, delicate and frantic. "You don't know how bad. Let me have it, huh? Come on, baby. Give me your cock."

And then Steve is sucking his fingers and Steve is breaching him, one finger pushing hard over his rim, and Tony isn’t himself for an instant, he is infinite; he is light and heat and love--ah god, so much love--all rolled up into one and he's coming, splattering on his belly and catching Steve's chin and Steve is looking at him, his eyes wide and adoring, wild blue sparks. And when he sits up and straddles Tony, knees pinned to either side of Tony’s body, there are no more tremors left, no more hesitation, only the loveliest sort of greed. He opens his pants and he pulls out his cock and tugs one out like he’s running a marathon, his hand flying, his come splattering on Tony’s chest, his face, and holy god, there’s a lot of it, wave after wave of white, of pleasure, of dirty sounds that make something hot and good claw at the cage of Tony’s heart and leave teeth marks on his ribs. He _wants_ , Tony does; oh, how he wants. God help him, he thinks as Steve folds like accordian all out of air, that blond head drifting dreamily to Tony’s chest, he’ll never stop.

Somehow, they stumble to bed, their clothes still a storm in the library. A warm cloth, a long kiss, and they fall together into the sheets, into dreams, hands spread over skin and knees touching.

"I love you," Tony says. Can it be that simple, he wonders? Maybe it can.

Steve kisses his forehead, his lips gently curving. "Funny, isn't it?" he murmurs. "I love you, too."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, it's not that simple, Tony. I'm afraid that it's not...


	7. Chapter 7

Tony wakes up to coffee and toast, coffee and toast and Steve’s bare back as he stands over the stove, poking cheerfully at bacon and eggs.

“Hey,” Steve says when Tony kisses his shoulder, rubs his face against Steve’s warm, smooth skin.

“Hi.”

Steve reaches back and tugs Tony against him; they stand over the busy burners hip-to-hip. “Wasn’t trying to wake you up.”

“You didn’t. Promise. Guess I got to the end of my dreams.”

When Steve looks at him, dares to take his eyes off the scrambled, Tony’s knees go cliche and nearly buckle, nearly. Anybody would, really, he tells himself, in the face of an expression that fond on features that beautiful. It’s a hell of a thing to wake up to. It’s the thing that wakes him properly up. He leans up for a kiss and Steve meets him halfway.

“Hey,” Steve says again against his mouth, his fingers digging into Tony’s side. “Hey, baby.”

“Hi,” Tony gets out, his lungs heading towards overdrive. “How the hell are you, Steve?”

The spatula falls with a clatter and Steve turns off the gas and then Tony’s jammed against the counter, the damn thing biting into his back in the best possible way.

“Hey,” Steve says once more, slow syllables and a hint of very bad/good intent. “Mornin’, Tony.”

Tony’s robe is ratty, more moth holes than silk, and Steve makes easy work of it, unwinding the knot while he sucks on Tony’s tongue and hums every time Tony comes up for breath. They don’t talk this time--maybe it’s the early of the hour, the faint sounds of horns honking below, the clatter of people talking in the hallway. Or maybe it’s the sun is cutting in through the window and drifting over the sink and draping itself over Steve’s shoulders and catching Tony in the brights of his eyes and it feels like the best way to wake up, Steve on his knees and old silk caught around Tony’s wrists and the two of them groaning, Tony with greed and Steve with anticipation and the world is boiled down to this: to the smell of half-cooked bacon and sweet coffee and the feel of Steve’s hands on his ass, big and strong and absolutely unfucking yielding and when Tony gives it up, closes his eyes and spills himself down Steve’s throat, Steve still doesn’t let him move, won’t let him go; just looks up and up and up and grins when Tony’s hand stumbles to his hair, still damp from the shower, and tugs at it like a kitten with string.

“Good morning,” Steve says again, his lips wet against Tony’s hip.

“Hey,” Tony manages through a broad, dopey smile. “Hi.”

He gets to return the favor this time, as soon as his bones aren’t made of Jello, but he makes Steve sit in a chair, pushes him feeble into the breakfast nook and mumbles sort of an order and Steve goes willing, laughing, laughing until Tony tumbles to the floor and paws at Steve’s pants and it’s apparently less hilarious after that. Steve’s hand curls around his head and Steve’s cock twitches in his mouth and Steve makes the happiest little noises when he comes, when he’s letting Tony taste him, when he’s emptying himself in Tony’s mouth.

“Oh,” he says, after, his chest still heaving. “Oh, Tony.”

He presses the tips of his fingers to Tony’s stretched lips and keeps them there as Tony eases him out, rubs wide-eyed at the mess he’s left behind.

When they kiss this time it’s bitter, bitter and sleepy and slick.

“Back to bed?” Tony says, nine kinds of hopeful. Somehow he’s now in Steve’s lap.

Warm breath in his ear. “Mmm. I’ve got to go in.”

“Five more minutes, though. Five more minutes won’t matter, right?”

“With you, baby?” A kiss on his temple, another on his chek. “It might.”

“I’ll come with you, then. Not to work. But down to the street. Maybe I’ll go in early. What time is it?”

“7:30.”

“There, you see?” He nuzzles the line of Steve’s neck, the trail of sweat he put there. “Never been in that early in my life. I’ll scare the starch out of her. She’ll wonder who I am and why I’ve suddenly turned over a new leaf.”

Steve laughs. It’s a sound Tony wants to curl into. “And what will you tell her?”

Tony’s heart skips a beat. Shit. What will he? The truth? She might pat him on the head. Or she might (more than likely) yell at him for eating dessert without finishing his brussel sprouts. _You have no choice_ , she’d said, all schoolmarm severe, and that was exactly what he paid her for, wasn’t it? Brutal honesty and 75 words a minute and the occasional apres-work treat. He blanched a little at the thought, at his own crass sort of cruelty; no, she was a friend, sometimes, that was all, a friend with sympathetic hands and she would understand why he hadn’t spilled the proverbial beans, wouldn’t she? There was no reason to, now; the most important part of the truth was out, and the rest of it, all the Rosamund de Bloom nonsense, was water under the flowery, metaphorical bridge.

He snuggles into Steve’s arms, arms that go happily tighter; Steve’s cheek comes to rest on his hair.

Yes, he tells himself, the cat with the cream, no reason to break that egg now. He’ll call his editor tomorrow and make the book he’s working on the last and live happily ever after in his own life, won’t he? Ta.

“You need a shower,” Steve says. “And a shave, if you’re gonna go in. Get a move on it, huh?”

“You’ll have to let me go first.”

A sigh, another long squeeze. “In a minute.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May not be able to write at my normal time in the AM, so am MM-ing tonight, just in case (and just because I'm enjoying writing for this Steve and this Tony).


	8. Chapter 8

When Tony knocks out of the bathroom, Brill creamed and minty fresh, he doesn’t have a care in the world. His mustache is trimmed and his cheeks are bare and there’s a hickey high on his neck; bruised pretty proof of an idea he still can’t quite wrap his head around: Steve loves him. Steve _wants_ him. Steve is gonna be the lodestar of his life.

It’s like he’s been wearing a ten-ton weight, is what it feels like, one made of concrete and steel and now, in just these handful of hours, that weight has flown off, been blown off by Steve’s mouth on his.

It’s a goddamn miracle. That’s what it is.

He steps off of the tile and onto the wood, his bare feet still damp. His shirt is buttoned and his pants are creased and Steve is--

Steve is--

“Steve?”

Tony stops halfway to his bedroom. The silence catches up to him fast. “Steve?” he calls again.

Nothing. No humming, no low buzz of the radio. Not a goddamn peep.

The apartment’s not that big--not like the house on Long Island; now that he could see Steve getting lost in, wandering off following some architecture or something, entranced by his mother’s Tiffany lamps or the hand-carved crown molding or the bright call of the conservatory that sits over the sea. But here, in this little place, ten rooms at best, there were few places for anyone--even a big, blond someone--to actually hide.

“Steve?” The word’s higher in his throat now. He checks the second guest bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen. “Rogers, where are you?”

“In here.”

The library, site of last night’s assignation. The door’s thrown open, the sun bright.

“Why the hell didn’t you answer me?” Tony says, standing in the doorway, pretending he’s not out of breath. “We go to bed, you go covert? That doesn’t seem fair.”

It’s a joke, it is, right up until he comprehends where Steve’s standing. What he’s holding. The flat look on his face.

“Tony.” The word like a crushed cracker. “What’s this?”

“That’s my, uh”--he clears his throat. Doesn’t work.--“just a project I’m working on. You know.”

Steve’s eyebrow goes up. So does his voice. “ _His Aching Arms_. That’s your project? Since when do you write?”

“Um? It’s, ah. That’s a working title, actually. I’m not a fan of the assonance.”

Steve doesn’t laugh; his lips don’t even twitch. “The content, though. You’re a fan of that.”

“Where did you get that?” Tony’s feet move without asking. “What the hell are you doing poking around in my desk?”

“I was looking for a pen.”

Tony snaps: “Newsflash, Cap, that’s not a pen that you’re holding. Kind of the opposite.” He feels itchy just seeing it, those 50-odd pages of his latest fucking draft caught up in Steve Rogers’ fist. 50 pages and the key to his secret identity and Steve’s standing in his goddamn library dressed in last night’s clothes with the damn things in his hands like they’re his.

“Did you write this?”

“None of your business.”

“I know that.” Steve’s voice is still now, still and low. There’s something awful about it. “But I’m asking anyway. I’d appreciate an honest answer.”

Tony’s heart is in his head, a timpani in both ears. It’s all he can do not to reach out and grab. “Steve--”

“I read a few pages. I didn’t mean to. But the words on the page caught my eye and for a minute, I couldn’t figure out why. And then it hit me, a dozen paragraphs in: I recognized the style. The turn of the prose. The penchant for rosewater metaphors.” Steve sets the sheaf down, very carefully, and turned his eyes to meet Tony’s. “And it should, right? You’re all I’ve been reading lately.” The corners of his lips turn up ever so sharply. “You’re Rosamund de Bloom, aren’t you?”

The seconds tick by, a handful of them, before Tony manage a breath. “Yes.”

“So the other night, when I read you that bit that reminded me of Peggy--that was you.”

“Yeah.”

“And did you write that before or after she left me?”

Tony swallows. “Uh. After.”

“She didn’t get the words from you, then.”

“No.”

Steve’s face ripples, an army of unsettled wings. “You got them from me, didn’t you? I told you what she said and you remembered.”

“Yeah.” Tony feels like a paper tiger; Steve’s expression, the match. “Yeah, I did. I’m sorry.”

Steve turns away and oh, god, that’s worse. That’s so much worse. “What are you sorry for?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I do know, I just--I don’t know how to put it, but I know I shouldn’t have--”

“No,” Steve says, soft, an awful echo of the night before, of the softness he’d given Tony then. “You shouldn’t have. That was private, what I told you, Tone. Kind of the worst night of my life.”

Damn it. Tony has to close his eyes. “Jesus, I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

“No. You did it because it made for a good story." Vinegar there, and soft, spreading bruise. The deep muscle type. “Seems like it worked. How many copies did that one sell, huh?”

They’re close, they’re standing so close, only a few inches of teakwood separating, and yet Tony can’t remember ever feeling this goddamn far away.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says again, because the good woods, they won’t come. “God, Steve, I’m so sorry. I fucked up.”

And then Steve looks at him, that beautiful, uncertain face, and it feels like every bone in Tony’s ribcage is cracking, as if his heart’s seeping out of his chest. “I think,” Steve says, “I think I should probably go. It’s late.”

“Ok.” Tony slides around the edge of the desk, steps away. “Yeah, sure. Ok.”

At the door, Steve stops, one hand splayed on the frame. “All you had to do was tell me, Tony. Not like you had to ask for permission. But a heads up, you know, that would’ve been only fair.”

A train of words, a maelstrom: “I never once, in a million fucking years, Steve, thought you’d ever read the damn thing. I swear to God.”

“I know.” Those blue eyes sad, sober knives. “For some reason, though, that doesn’t help it sit any better right now. Doesn’t make it feel alright.”

Tony stands there, a damn statue, and listens to Steve’s footsteps fade away. To the front door as it opens, clicks shut. To the sound of the elevator in the far distance, the disappearance of the love of his life.

_He’ll get over it_ , his head says as he sinks to the floor. _Of course he will. He loves me. Maybe._  
  
_But maybe_ , his heart says as he pitches slowly over and tucks his face into the carpet, the same one Steve had made his body kiss a few hours before. _He loves me and he won’t._


	9. Chapter 9

_His Aching Arms_ (pg. 141-145) [DRAFT]

_Schuyler drummed her fingers on the edge of the windowsill, her eyes fixed outside on the never-ending rain. It had been a week since His Lordship’s abrupt departure, since he had admitted that he’d wronged her, and though the world outside had not changed a wit, the same, she thought wryly, could not be said for the state of her heart._

_She had been angry--furious, her father would have called it, the sort of fury that had oft resulted in hurled books or broken crockery when she was a child. And surely she’d had every right; it wasn’t every day that a man as cool and cultured as Lord Robert conceded any fault, especially to a young lady at whom he had once sneered. Oh, she remembered that first night he’d come to the house in her older brother’s carriage, bringing with him news of the duel in London, of Andrew’s virtue in the face of another man’s sword, of his awful and untimely death. She had raged at him then, Lord Robert; screamed at him, beaten her fists on his chest, carried on so terribly that he had dragged her out to the garden, to what had been the still of the night, and bade her to scream at the moon. She had battered the darkness with the sounds of her grief, heard them echo from the cool, familiar hills, until she had no more left in her; until the only thing that kept her from the ground were his arms wrapped around her, strong and steady even as they shook, even as he pressed his mouth to her hair and murmured soft things, kind things, that brought her back to her body, to the earth._

_Some awful part of her had wanted him to kiss her then, to hold her tear-streaked face in his hands and lower his lips to hers so that they might forget about that night, about her brother, about all the terrible things that, in his absence, lay ahead for Schuyler and her mother, for the younger ones who had for so long looked to Andrew for guidance in the absence of their father, in his stead. Instead, though, he had held her for a long time in the new quiet, the shadows of the moon dancing over the grass as his heart thudded against her back._

_No, he hadn’t kissed her then. And she was glad that he hadn’t. If their bodies had reacted that night as they had at the Blankenships’ ball when they’d found themselves locked in the library, the key gone and scandal brewing and neither of them willing, yet, to trust the other--she shivered now, looking out at the cold, windy road, at the unwavering acres of wet--and yet when their mouths had met, his hands gripping the folds of her dress and hers no longer fists but twin warm, greedy grasp, it was as if the air were on fire, her lungs drawing in the sweetest flames with every breath. One kiss, one collision of tongues, and she had resented her dress, the acres of satin and lace that separated them. Even when he had dipped her fingers into her bodice and tugged one silk swell free, that had not been enough, for he had lowered his mouth and tugged her rosebud into his mouth and groaned and when she had touched him again, run her hands down his chest and to his belt, she had felt the heat of him there, the steel, and she’d known that this most male part of him hungered for her and if she’d let him, if she’d pulled up her skirt and lain back on Lord Blankenship’s desk, he’d have taken her then and there. And the core of her was so alight, so slick with an unknown promise that God help her, she'd wanted him to._

_He’d known of his betrayal then, been well aware of the cruel nature of his lies. Then and in all the nights that had come after, the bright happy days: Robert’s ring on her finger and his mouth on her body, digging up its secrets; his damp head pitched against her thighs as he gave her an earthquake with his tongue and the stretch of his fingers and when he’d come, spilling his seed over her belly, the small turns of her breasts, he had looked for all the world like an angel, broad and golden, even as he swore through his pleasure, cursing like the devil himself._

_Schuyler laid her forehead against the window, drank in the cool and the damp. If only he’d been less of a coward, she thought. If only he’d been brave enough that first awful night to tell her the truth. Lying to her mother about the circumstances of Andrew’s death, the brewing scandal that had died with him, that was one thing; that was, she had come to realize reluctantly, a real and true kindness. But to lie to Schuyler, over and over again, even after he’d come to know her well enough to understand that whatever the nature of her brother’s shame, she was strong enough to withstand it--how could he have been so foolish? For it was the duplicity of it all--Andrew’s, then Robert’s--not the content of the lie itself--that she could not understand._

_So she’d thrown him out a week ago before his confession was even cold and yet here she stood, like a white lady before the water, watching the road for him day after day, his grandmother’s ring still on her finger, her affection for him like a forest after a fire: charred but undimmed._

_There were chores to do and children to chase. She could hear her mother calling to her from the front room; she thought, it must be nearly dinner-time._

_But these thoughts of domestic necessity were pushed aside when she spied her mother’s desk, saw the letters carefully sorted into pigeon-holes inside, and before she could blink, she was sat before it, pen fresh drawn from the well and a fresh sheet of paper she smoothed flat with her hand. Why had she not thought of this before? she wondered. She had sent Robert away; he had respected her wishes. There was no way he would return to her unless she reached out to ask._

Dearest Robert, _she wrote, unhesitating._ Come back to me.

 

****

Tony yanks the page from the typewriter and slides it to the bottom of the pile and shoves the stack into a broad envelope before he can change his damn mind; scrawls Steve’s address on it, reaches for his basket of stamps.

He can't talk about his own feelings for shit, especially feelings as big as this, the one that starts in L and ends with a V and an E. But if there's one thing he can do, it's hide behind his characters--hell, he's done it the whole time he's loved Steve--so why stop right now when he needs the shelter of fiction the most?

Tony set his jaw. Fuck, he thought, it was as either this or call, and god help him, just the thought of picking up the receiver makes him break out in a sweat. Because what if Steve didn’t answer? What if the damn thing just rang and rang and rang? Or worse, god: what if he did? What the hell would Tony say? _I said I was sorry get over your damn self please Rogers you can’t ice me out like this not after--_

So writing’s safer. Writing’s better. Even if it means his pleading will arrive dressed in a 19th century guise.

The box on his desk buzzes. “Mr. Stark,” Pepper says, elegant and efficient. “Miss Romanov from the UN is here.”

“Fine," Tony says. "Send her in. And come in with her, would you? There’s something I need you to stick in the mail for me, please."

****

The next afternoon, there’s an envelope that sticks out from the rest. Tony’s office address is neatly penned on it in green.

_Dear Tony:_

_Don’t you think the tone of Schuyler’s letter is kind of demanding? Yes, the “state of her heart” has changed (nice phrase, by the way), but from what little I gleaned of Lord Robert in the other pages I read, he strikes me as somebody who’ll have a hard time giving up hurts. And Schuyler hurt him, you know, even though she didn’t mean to. That’s going to be hard for him to let go of, I think, no matter how much he feels for her. And that’s a lot._

_You’re the writer, though; these are just my impressions. Suggestions, maybe? Anyway, happy to read more should you choose to send it along._

_Sincerely,_

_Steve_

_PS. Will mail back your pages just as soon as I can track down enough stamps. I’ve asked Miss Maximoff to order me a new roll._


	10. Chapter 10

_His Aching Arms_ p. 146-151 [DRAFT]

_Two days later, Robert tapped the letter against his teeth and wondered again if he should open it. That he hadn’t torn it open the moment Jacob bore it in on a tray was, he thought, a feat of rather extraordinary will. At first, he had resisted because he wanted to be alone when he cracked the wax, snapped Schuyler’s seal and read whatever nonsense she’d chosen to pour out by hand. For it was her penwork on the outside, there was no doubt; the woman had a distinctive, furious scrawl. Indeed, there was fury in all that she did, a sort of dancing fire that informed her way through the world, but it was more than anger, he’d learned, more of a passion, a drive and desire that her country upbringing, her self-involved parents, had never taught her to tap into, much less to tame._

_Jacob passed through the door and disappeared down the hallway and still, the letter stayed unopened, close-mouthed in the palm of Robert’s hand._

_It had never been his intention to smooth out her edges, to hone away what it was that made her unique. It had never been his intention, truly, to have a damn thing to do with her at all. That first terrible night when they’d met, he’d come as a carrion, a messenger of her brother’s death, and somehow, somehow that awful duty had crested with her in his arms, her screams scraped away by sobbing and her body trembling against his as he tried to find words to soothe her, as he fought the wild urge to bury his face in her neck and bank the embers of her grief with a kiss._

_They had come a long way since that night._

_What had begun for him as some unnamable passion had become the sort of love he’d always laughed at, the kind where Schuyler’s smile, the smell of her skin, made him feel as mad as her desire did; the way she clutched at his fingers when he sank them inside her, the way she thrust her hips up towards his mouth--now it was he who burned for her, who was fire, who had become hard pressed to foresee a day when he would not spend part of it in the myriad pleasures of her company. The ring he’d placed on her finger, then, was both a sign of promise and a surrender: never before had he known a woman’s love so fierce, so piercing, and that for her he felt the same in return astounded him every moment they were together, every time the light caught the ruby shine of his grandmother’s ring._

_He’d been a week without it, only, and God, had her absence made the world feel utterly gray._

_Now, as he sat by the fire holding her letter, the chase of rain loud on the cobblestones outside, he hesitated as much from dread as anticipation. It was not so thick, this missive, so how much could she say? How many words did it take to say _I am sorry_ , though? Perhaps more, he thought, than it would to say _Stay away_._

__

_He had erred, without question. He should have told her why her brother died and not restricted himself, out of some fool sense of preserving Andrew’s honor, to relaying the mechanics of how. But over the last months, as he walked the world at Schuyler’s side, how they had come to know one another seemed far less important than the fact that they had, that some kind hiccup of the cosmos had seen to it that they did. He thought back to that day in the forest, the green roof above them, the crush of soft earth below, and between it, the soft hills of her flesh, bared to him for the first time, every inch of her his eyes for the taking. And she had insisted on the same courtesy, on him hanging his breeches on the same bush where her dress lay and stretching out beside her on her mother’s oldest sheet and ah, God, the way that she’d looked at him, greedy and curious with her soft, opened hands--even now, the thought of her eyes that day made him groan. She had urged him on his side and leaned her breasts against him and tugged out his spend with her hands as she breathed heavy over his lips and he had come close to taking her that day, as he had so many times before; how many times could they walk to the edge of the fire, he’d wondered, delirious, bursting full over her first, before one of them stumbled and the other fell happily and her belly swelled from the marriage of her body, his seed?_

__

_Well, he thought, looking down at her letter. At present, there was no fear at least of that._

__

_The clock on the mantle struck four and outside, beyond the fog, church bells rang, and before he could think better of it, he broke her seal and opened her folds._

__

Dearest Robert, _he read_. Come back to me.

__

_The note held only five lines but he read them each a dozen times, amazed at each_ _one_ _anew_ :

__

You meant no harm, I understand that now, though it is no less true that you should have anticipated the effects of your omissions. But I find, much to my own surprise, that what you did then is now of less import to me than what you have done since. I love you, and though forgiveness is not as easy as the heart would make it so, I would much prefer to seek it with you at my side than with you on what at this moment feels like the opposite end of the world.

__

If you can forgive me--for I know that I have hurt you; how could I not, in my fury?--then Robert, please, I beg you: set aside the affairs of the city once more and come back to me.

__

Yours, always.

__

\--S

__

_And then all at once Robert was on his feet, rushing, beaming, bellowing at full voice down the hall:_

__

_“Jacob! Send the boy for my horse, please. And find my valise. I’m riding out now, tonight!_ ”

__

 

__

****

__

 

__

The envelope’s typewritten this time; the note inside scribbled in black. Pepper brings it in with his coffee.

__

_What I like about your characters, T, is that none of them are an ideal. More importantly: none of them want to be. They’re all a bit messy, is what I mean, ragged at the edges, even the beautiful women. Admittedly, I haven’t read a lot of other stuff in this genre, but if the movies are any guide, then I’d guess that the love stories you write are something special this way. Love isn’t neat, is it, ever; never starts when it should or proceeds in a logical way. There’s a lot of room for mistakes and misunderstandings, for one person to mess up, make up, and then the other one to lose their way, but despite all that (or maybe because of it?) it feels like Schuyler and Robert are headed in the right direction--back towards each other. I’m glad. That’s a very good thing._

__

_\--Steve_

__

_PS. Peggy and her husband have invited me to dinner on Saturday. The Waldorf, at 7. I was inclined to say no, but then something better occured: why don’t you come with me?_ _Shoot me a line and let me know._

__


	11. Chapter 11

So Tony goes. Of course he goes. This is, after all, a story about the love of his life.  
 

****

He walk through the front entrance of the Waldorf five minutes early. Five minutes and not thirty because he’d forced himself to slow down, to wander around the apartment dressed to the nines and not freak the hell out. It was, he thinks, blind to the ambiance, the warm, careful elegance of the lobby, a close thing.

He’d changed his mind a dozen times since he’d stuck that note to Steve in the mail, bold in its brevity with an air of devil-may-care, and there is part of him that still wonders what in the fresh hell he’s thinking, having dinner with a man he adores and the woman who said man once wanted enough to shop for a solitaire and the actual husband of that woman who might have no clue about the circus tent that his wife’s dragged him in to. Never mind that Tony hasn’t seen Steve for almost two weeks, that the last time they saw each other, Tony could practically hear the stuttering gears of Steve’s heart; never mind that he’s woken up hard nearly every morning since, the kind of hard that goes away after a simple application of friction but never really fades. In all his years, all his lovers, Tony’s never known an absence, a lack of goddamn presence, that’s haunted him like this. He’s always thought saying _I love you_ was the scariest part of falling in love, but he was wrong; yeah, he was. The worst part, he thinks, doing a subtle scan of all the pretty rich people in the lobby, is feeling this kind of need, like part of him was missing, like if he didn’t have Steve at his side soon, something in him, fundamental, would shatter and break.

Suddenly, he spots Steve easing towards him from the direction of the bar, and holy hell, talk about breaking: Rogers is a certified knockout. Steve’s always been beautiful in that annoyingly effortless way but tonight, add that everyday wow to the way his tux clung to his body, the way it moved with him like a shadow, and it takes all the iron in Tony’s arsonal not to fall breathlessly to his knees.

Steve grins. Tony stays upright. Hears. “Hi, Tony.”

“Hey, Rogers. Nice suit.”

“This? Hardly ever get the chance to take it out. Been awhile since I was frogmarched to anything formal.”

“It’s, ah.” Tony’s staring. He knows he is. Because he knows now what’s under that suit. The curves of Steve’s chest, the delicately hard lines. The sweet little poke of his nipples, Christ. “It’s fetching.”

Steve’s mouth lifts again. “Thanks. You look pretty fetching yourself."

"Oh. Thanks."

"They’re waiting for us in there; the table was ready a little early. You ready to have a seat or do you want a drink first?”

_I want answers_ , Tony thinks. _I want to know why we’re here, why you wanted me here. I want to know what good you think is gonna come out of this. I want to know if we’re really ok or if this correspondence stuff has been some kind of love letter kabuki. I want to know why we’re not upstairs right now making good use of a big bed. I want--_

Tony squares his shoulders, apes a military bearing. “I imbibed before I departed, sir: a strong rye on the rocks. Count me as ready to proceed.”

Steve rolls his eyes and dips his head and catches Tony by the elbow gently, stars steering him through the Saturday evening crush. “So,” he says, “Peggy’s husband’s name is Daniel. American, as it happens, wounded bad in France in ‘42. He ended up beached in London for the duration and never left. Peggy was one of his nurses before she hightailed it over here in ‘45.”

“She told you all this?"

Steve chuckles. “He did. Ran into him at the bar about a half an ago while she was still getting ready. I guess we both needed a boost.”

“You had a drink.” Tony cuts his eyes up and over, leans a little into Steve’s easy grip. “With Peggy’s husband.”

“Yeah. I like him, believe it or not. Is that strange?”

God, what a goddamn Steve thing to ask. “Rogers,” Tony says with a patience he doesn’t feel, “this whole evening is strange. The definition of awkward dinner theater. Honestly, I have no goddamn clue why you want me here, unless you’re dying to give me front row seats to a train wreck.”

They screech to a halt at the edge of the restaurant; there’s a line at the maitre d's stand. “This isn’t a train wreck,” Steve says. “This is a reality check, Tone. A show of force. Because if there’s one word that Peggy never understood, in the whole time that I’ve known her, that word is _no_.”

“So?”

The line glides forward. They do. “So I could’ve said no--to her letter, to her invitation--but it wouldn’t have done any good. She’d have kept writing, kept trying, kept pushing--not just this time, but any time she happened to be passing through. Saying no thanks won’t do a damn bit of good. That’s just her way, Tone; she has to be shown.”

Tony blinks. Shakes the marbles in his head and blinks again. “You’re using me to shut down your ex-fiancee? That’s what all this is about?”

He feels a small pressure at his back, a nudge; the maitre’d is waving them forward, leading them into the tight maze of tables. They follow, Steve at Tony’s back.

“No,” Steve says, pitching his voice below the clamor of silverware. “This is about you making it up to me. Wiping the slate clean, and all that. Finishing up one story, you might say, and winding in a fresh page.”

“Oh yeah? And what happens after that?”

“After that..." A small, hopeful twist. "I figure we're due for a talk. A good long one, huh?"

"Yeah," Tony says. His gut does a happy jump. "We are that."

The maitre d comes to a halt, nods at a four-top tucked between velvet walls. “Your party, gentlemen.”

“We’ll see,” Steve murmurs as Daniel stands stiffly, smiling, as Peggy extends Tony an elegant hand. “We shall see.”  
  


****  
  


Daniel, it turns out, is funny as hell, in that dry-as-toast kind of way. It’s very English, even if his accent is very much not.

They’re seated boy-girl-boy-Stark, with Peggy settled between Steve and her husband like a queen. She’s just as lovely as Tony remembered, white teeth and piles of dark curls into which (his damnable imagination tells him) Steve’s face was once buried on the regular; now, though, it’s pinned at the crown and loose over her shoulders and stays that way, perfect, even when she tosses her head back to laugh, her face turning open and beautiful between two men whose hearts she’d had tied to her string. Her bodice is low and her cleavage is plentiful, just on the classy-not-trashy side of the street, and there’s part of him, low and somewhere simmering, that can see in Technicolor dreamboat the precise nature of her appeal. If he let himself, if he lingered, he can imagine what she’d look like with her dress undone, with her skirt pulled up and her slip torn and one of these men deep inside her, her tits bouncing with every big thrust and yes, ok, twist his arm, yes: he can the goddamn appeal.

They’d never really talked, he and Peggy, when she and Steve were together. Never seemed like the occasion arose. In part because Tony had stayed away, away away, first from the notion of Steve having a steady, much less a girl he wanted to marry. But there was, too, he realizes now, staring her down beyond his salad fork, never any initiative on her part, either, to make nice with him. Maybe they’d both seen the logic in keeping their separate ways.

Maybe she’d something Steve hadn’t. Maybe the way Tony felt, when he thought the whole thing was lost, had been laid out bare on his face.

Oh god.

He fumbles for his wine glass and drowns himself in white for a moment. He tries not to think about shit like their engagement party held at his house out on Long Island: Steve blushing, Peggy beaming, him giving a toast in his shirtsleeves drunk out of his mind. Tries to shoo his head, too, away from the afternoon he’d come to pick up Steve for a doubleheader and Peggy had answered the door wearing only one of Steve’s shirts, and that big, fuckoff ring.

“There must have been a mix-up,” she’d said with a smile, her temple tipped against the doorframe. “He’s out like a light for the time being, I’m afraid. I guess he's mine tonight. Should I ask him to ring you?”

“No,” Tony had said, already fucking retreating. “Sorry to disturb you. Disrupt. Whatever. Don’t mention it, ok? Forget it.”

Tonight, though, he thinks, staring, she may be sitting next to Steve, sure, but goddamn it, so is he.

“To- _ny_ ,” Peggy says now, “do explain to Daniel what you do. I did try, but I’m afraid I might’ve mangled it. Didn’t I, darling?”

“I’ve no idea,” Daniel says. He pulls up the bottle and pours Tony more wine, bless him. “You run a charity, yes?”

“Not quite a charity. I hate that word, honestly. No offense meant. Just something I feel strongly about.”

“Huh. Why is that?”

“There’s an obligation that word implies, isn’t there? Like, ah, um, a caretaking sort of role. As if those whom our work affects are childlike, you know, too naive or poor or stupid to change their own world.”

“Ah.” Daniel’s eyebrows lift. “A patriarchal sort of relationship? Yes, I can see that. So what word do you prefer?”

“Ah, foundation. That’s what we call ourselves: the Maria Stark Foundation, after my mother. A woman of great mind and too much patience, I’m afraid. At least where my father was concerned.”

If only he could lean over and lay one on Steve, he thinks as Daniel starts asking polite if not terribly interested questions, that would settle the question once and for all. Even a casual brush, the kind that couples all around the room--the other one at this table--seems to trade between every course. This is the thing with he and Steve, isn’t it, the thing that’s sat between them for so fucking long: so much unsaid, so much that there aren’t polite words for. So much that looks just like, feels just like, what all the men-and-women pairs in the place can taste without asking, without wondering, without even considering if their smooch will become a matter of someone else’s offense.

Well. He checks himself, reaches again for his wine. All the white couples in here, that is.

Tony sneaks a look at Steve, at the pretty draw of his jawline, the animated bob of his hands. The conversation has moved on to military hoodoo, it seems, the three of them talking War and France and Germany Italy, France, and though it’s paint drying to him, the three of them seem downright delighted to talk about killing and suffering and all The Shit Europe (and Not America) Has Seen.

What the hell, he thinks, moody again, tipping his knee against Steve’s under the table. How can they--what had Steve said? _Show Peggy no_?--when they can’t even touch about the tablecloth? He stares at his glass for a second. Maybe he needs another one or three, he thinks, before he can see the point of the evening as anything other than completely far-fetched.

And then he realizes that Steve’s looking at him, that he’s smiling. That his mouth is still moving and he’s still talking about long-ago enemies but his hand has eased down, like a man searching for his napkin, except he’s found the top of Tony’s leg instead. And he’s squeezing, smooth and strong, and he’s smiling, the soft one that makes his mouth look like a rose. Tony’s written odes to that mouth and stuck them in other people’s stories, between other people’s lips, and oh, lord knows, there are words now:

_Schuyler’s mouth parted, the world on the tip of her tongue_  
_Robert’s lips were wet from her, with her, and he tasted like_  
_Her back curved as he stroked her and her teeth caught her lip, bit_  
_His mouth was hot where she touched it, greedy, and when she fed him her fingers he_

He keeps them in, barely, but fuck, he doesn’t want to. He wants to knock over the bottle and interrupt the conversation and spills his words, the ones Steve sparks in him, over every inch of the creamy white cloth and down the pretty shoals of Peggy’s low-cut fucking dress and over Daniel’s lap. He wants them to hit the carpet, his phrases, shatter like so much beautiful glass so that everybody in the restaurant can see them, feel them, hear them rattle around in their heads.

He’s so close to doing it, to saying something he shouldn’t, to letting Lord Robert or Schuyler or Cam or Drummond put their heads down and come racing out of his mouth, but then his eye catches Peggy’s and it’s stunned, her face, her gaze dark and stormy, because she’s seeing him, isn’t she, he and Steve both. She can see the way they’re seeing each other.

Oh god, yes. She can.

It’s over in an instant, like a flash bang, and then Peggy’s laughing again, tossing her head back and saying something wry about England and Steve’s knee is pitched into his and what do you know, despite the strange of it all, Tony’s smiling, too.

“Sorry, Tony!” Daniel calls. “God, I'm a terrible host, aren't I? We didn’t mean to shut you out. War stories are like rabbits though, you know; the damn things seem to multiply in mixed company.”

Tony shakes his head. Feels Steve’s hand fall away, but the heat of it is still there. So’s the soft look on Steve’s face. “Forget it,” he says. “God knows, I don’t envy you all a stitch for what you went through over there.”

“Why didn’t you serve, Tony?” Peggy says, spritely. A stake behind the smile. “I’ve always wondered. Steve never said.”

Tony sweeps his hand aside. “Because it’s a boring story, and nobody likes boring stories, ma’am, least of all me.”

“But I do.” She props her elbow beside her empty plate and plants her chin in her hand. Gives him a look to defy the devil. “I’d love to hear that little tale. Surely it can’t be that bad, can it?”

“Peggy,” Steve interjects, “I don’t think--”

“All right,” Tony says over top of him, matching Peggy's sweet sharp with his own. “I’ll be happy to bore you senseless, since you insist. But we’ll need another bottle of wine, at least, just to try and keep you stimulated. Or maybe the lady would prefer dessert?”

“Dessert!” Daniel says a little too loudly. He looks a bit bewildered, like everyone’s just started speaking French and he’s forgotten his dictionary. “Yes, darling, why don’t we do that? The cart was going around before. There was a pecan pie that looked delicious. Can’t remember the last time I had any that tasted right. That's one thing they haven't figured out over there, you know: sickly sweet American desserts.

“Tony,” Steve says _sotto voce_ when while Daniel summons the waiter, while Peggy pretends to ignore them, “you don’t owe anyone an explanation. You know that, right?”

“Oh, I know,” Tony says. “But you know what else I know, Rogers?”

Steve’s blues twinkle. Damn, Tony's missed that. “What?”  
  
“That _no_ you mentioned earlier?” He lifts his eyebrows up, grins. “I think the lady’s got it. Loud and real fucking clear.”

"Really?" Steve leans too close. Tony can smell his cologne, the faint chase of tobacco. "Isn't that interesting?"

_Schuyler’s mouth parted, the world on the tip of her tongue._

"Yeah," Tony murmurs. "It is."


	12. Chapter 12

With dessert comes a good brandy, the kind that puts a haze around the world, around Tony’s senses, around Peggy’s increasingly chilly visage. It’s not that she’s rude or anything--love her or hate her, she’s a class act all the way--but there’s a firmness in her face now, resin sort of mask. No, not resin, Tony thinks, floating on a cloud of cognac: more like _resigned_. She’s lost this round, hands down. Hell, she’s lost the war. If marrying a nice guy like Daniel--a man who clearly adores her, who looks at her like she’s like Venus di Milo, who beams every time she throws a smile his way--and building a good life in a country brought to its knees by the Nazis but never broken, even its darkest hours can be counted as a loss. It isn’t that she seems unhappy with Daniel; she doesn’t. But she wants Steve, too, and she can’t have him and she doesn’t really understand why and that’s what’s got her so ruffled, Tony thinks, what’s made her go quiet. She doesn’t like the not-knowing. Not one bit at all.

“Darling, are you drifting on me?” Daniel lifts a hand to Peggy’s cheek. “You haven’t said a word in ages.”

She smiles. It doesn’t quite touch her eyes. “Just tired, my dear. I’m fading rather faster than I’d like.”

He leans over and kisses her, this small, gentle thing, and her hand finds his, curls itself around the turn of his wrist. “If you don’t drink me under the table this one time, Nurse Carter, I promise that I’ll love you anyway. Pretty sure that was in our marriage vows, wasn’t it? Right after love, honor, and obey.”

Her mouth lifts again; softer now. “We took obey out, remember?”

“We did, didn’t we?” He kisses the tip of her nose. “Well, I’ve made a habit of it, anyway.”

“Good strategy,” Tony says. Steve kicks him under the table. “Fuck. By which I mean, Sousa, that yours is a lady, something tells, who’s used to getting her way.”

“What was that about?” Steve says on the way out. Peggy’s gliding ahead, leading the way.

“What was what about, what?”

“Your tongue was getting a little sharp there, don’t you think?”

“I think I’ve earned it. And she sure as hell has. Even after all this,she’d shiv me in a second and drag you away if she could.”

“I think you’re drunk.”

Tony stops, does a wobbly spin, nails a finger in Steve's chest. “I think,” he hisses, “that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Steve Rogers, because if you weren’t, I’d have never sat through that shit show. Wouldn’t have made it through the first fucking course. You’re lucky that I love you, asshole.”

A sputter, a spit, a shove towards the lobby: “Jesus, Tony!”

But then they’re in the lobby, ah ha, and they’re making nice, they’re lying to each others’ faces about how nice this was and how good it was to meet you and how we really must do this again.

“No,” Tony says once the elevator’s swallowed Peggy and Daniel. “No way. Once was more than enough.” He tugs at his tie; it’s been fine all night, but now the damn thing feels like a boa constrictor. “I’m hot. Aren’t you hot, Steve, inside that whole monkey suit?”

Steve is shaking his head. Steve is laughing at him. Steve is covering his face and laughing again. “Monkey suit? I thought you said I looked fetching.”

“No,” Tony says, squinting, “you look gorgeous. But I was trying to be subtle.”

“Ok, ok. Yeah, wow. You’re drunk.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, you so are.” A strong arm under his elbow and they’re moving, moving somewhere, Tony towed along like a toy boat. Albeit one prone to struggle.

“Don’t you fucking drag me out of here, Rogers. I can get a damn cab on my own.”

“Not out,” Steve says. They stop. Huh. There are buttons. “Up.”

“Up?”

Steve’s cheeks are pink, English roses. “Like I said, we need to talk. I thought being on neutral turf might help.”

The pleasant clouds in Tony’s head start to boil.“So you got us a room.”

“Why do you think I got here so early?” The chime sounds and the doors open. “It wasn’t because I needed a drink. I do actually have some at home.”

“You got us a room?” Tony says again, way too loudly. The elevator operator gives them a hell of a look.

“Tenth floor, please,” Steve tells the guy, a skinny kid who’s gone all wide-eyed. “Yeah, I did, Tone. You need a place to sleep all this off.”

Steve is holding on to his arm and Steve is doing his damnedest not to smile and Steve is beside him in an elevator, just like the first day we met.

“We met in an elevator,” Tony tells the birdy kid who has _Clint_ on his nametag. “Me and this handsome guy here.”

“Uhhhh,” the kid says. “Ok?”

“He was job hunting. I would’ve hired him on the spot if he’d knocked on my door. Luckily, he didn't, because damn would that have made office meetings awkward."

“Er.” The kid turns back to the numbers, face purple. “Tenth floor, you said, sir?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Steve says when the doors open, when they’re padding down the hallway.

Tony snorts. “No shit. You’re just figuring that out now?”

Then suddenly he’s against the wall, pinned between two silent, locked doors. “Tony,” Steve breathes in his face, “you’re ridiculous and you’re smashed and you’re beautiful and if you fall on your face before we have a chance to work things out, I’ll be so goddamn pissed.”

“What’s to work out, huh?” Tony’s arms are flung around Steve’s neck. Of course they are. What better place could there be? Also handy for staying upright. “I don’t want to work any shit out. I want you to kiss me.”

Steve’s hands on his hips, big and warm. “You need to keep your voice down.”

Tony laughs, a sound that rings down the corridor. “Oh, no. That’s exactly what fucked me over before with you, baby, and I’m not doing that shit ever again.”


	13. Chapter 13

Tony thinks Steve is gonna plant on one him right there, he does, but Steve--for all that he’s hot and close and fantastically grabby--is still, you know, Steve. And Steve, bless him, is stubborn and Steve had a plan and said plan does not, apparently, involve mauling Tony in the hall. Damn and blast it.

“Come on,” Steve says. He nudges Tony into an awkward shuffle. “It’s right down here.”

“What is?”

“The room.”

“Our room.” Tony’s voice feels all dreamy. “Our own little room at the inn.”

He clings to Steve’s shoulder while a key is produced and driven straight home and then they’re staggering, a four-legged beast stumbling into a doorway and into a room filled with warm, gentle light. The carpet is plush, the crushed color of roses, and the walls are a deeper shade of the same. Steve is still holding him and the door is closed now, yes. At fucking last, after more than two weeks, they’re finally at last alone. 

Oh. They're alone.

So why the hell does he feel nervous, again?

And apparently Steve does, too, or he's waiting for a cue, because they're just sort of hovering a few steps from the door, frozen, like two deer who've stumbled on firelight.

Tony clears his throat. “I, ah. I wrote a book once where this happened."

“Where what happened?”

“The hero, Brigham, he rents a room for Heather, the heroine. They’re meeting at this inn off the beaten path to talk about some black market business--he’s a pirate, see, and she--”

Steve chuckles and nuzzles Tony’s hair. “She needs money to get married,” he says, “and her uncle’s stolen her dowry, so he wants to invest every last cent she has in Brigham’s next voyage, right?”

“Wait." Tony's stomach flips. "You’ve read _His Secret Treasure_?”

“Mmm," Steve says. "I've read all of them."

"You've read--?!"

"Yeah. Over the last couple of weeks. So Brigham gets there before Heather does and the weather is awful--”

Tony swallows. There's a heat in his hips, in his throat. Steve's read his work, _knowing_ that it's his work? Like, by choice? Jesus christ. “Ah ah," he gets out, "it's not just awful. It's the worst storm in 50 years.”

“Naturally.” Steve’s palms curl around Tony’s biceps. “And he tells himself he’s doing Heather a favor, getting a room for her, right? That way she won’t have to ride back to town that night. Except he makes the mistake of going up with her--”

“He has to,” Tony says, leaning back into the glory of Steve’s grip. “There’s an argument in the tavern; somebody takes a swipe at him with a knife. And Heather insists on seeing how bad it is. Volunteers to stitch him up.”

“Because she loves him,” Steve breathes. His mouth falls to Tony’s temple.

“Yes. She doesn’t know it yet, or she won’t quite let herself, but when she takes off his coat..." He turns his hands inside the lapels of Steve's tuxedo jacket and tugs until Steve gets the message and lets go of him, blue skies burning; lets his arms falls slack as Tony peels the jacket off and drops it in a midnight pool at their feet. "She sees the blood on his shirt," Tony murmurs, touching the white starch of Steve's, "and she can’t deny it anymore, how much it is feels for him."

Steve dips his head, kisses the heat of Tony’s cheek, whispers: “And she can’t understand, in that particular moment, why the hell she ever did.”

Something inside Tony is blooming, something small and soft and heretofore untouched. God, Steve reading his stories, Steve _liking_ his stories at least well enough to remember them--it makes his stupid heart feel like it’s about to up and take wing. He wants to say that--he should say that--but he’s too sloshed and too hard and too needy to make the words form, much less get them out.

“Thank you for not letting Peggy stab me, by the way. I’m glad that sort of verisimilitude wasn’t a prerequisite to all this.”

A snort, a tease of lips against his own. “I really did want to talk to you, Tony. I realized that this might, I mean--but there are things we should discuss at some point.”

Tony claws at the base of Steve’s back. “Yeah, fine, I know, blah blah blah conversation blah, but not now, ok?”

“No, honey,” Steve murmurs, his fingers shoving into Tony’s hair. “Not right now.”

When they kiss this time, with no secrets between them, it’s like a scrim has been lifted. There’s no twinge of guilt, no fear of accidental discovery, just the eager sink of Steve’s tongue and his warm, generous mouth and when Tony’s head knocks the wall, his ass, too, he’s incredibly grateful for the damn thing because his knees as like hot jelly and his hands curled around the peach curves of Steve’s ass and if the wall wasn’t there, if the builders hadn’t built it, he’d be only the floor already, felled by one incredible fucking kiss.

“Bed,” he says when Rogers lets them both up for air. “Come on, my beautiful would-be pirate. Take me to bed."


	14. Chapter 14

There may be a day when Steve tossing him onto neatly-made sheets doesn’t make Tony hot. There may be a time when the sight of Steve fighting buttons to get down to bare skin, tearing at his tie and peeling out of his vest and his shirt, is something that will feel everyday. There may even, in some distant future, be a night when the sound Steve makes when his cock comes free, when he looks Tony in the eye and strokes himself once and makes that sound again, doesn’t make each and every cell in Tony’s body feel like its own fire, like the air is smoke and each breath is tinder and the only water that can soothe him lives in Steve’s hands, his skin, the promise of his hard, hungry mouth.

But tonight, in this private pocket place away from the terrors of old loves, of misunderstandings, of feelings kept too long in shadows, there is this: Steve Rogers, his best friend, the person he loves, standing flushed and eager before him, looking at Tony as if he’s the lost world.

He pitches up a little and reaches out his hand. “Come here, you blackguard. I need you."

Steve doesn’t budge. “There’s this word," he says, incongruous. "This word you use a lot in your books, I’ve noticed.”

“Um.” Steve’s still stroking his cock. It’s goddamn distracting. “Do what?”

“When the hero is overcome. When he’s about to take the heroine. There’s a word you always use to describe what he want to do to her. _Ravish_.”

“Well, yeah. They won’t let me say _fuck_. Too pointed for feminine ears or something."

“I like it.” A rasp, a bead of wet at the tip of his dick. “That word, _ravish_. I like it a lot.” 

“Oh, ah--”

Their eyes meet and dear god, the look on Steve’s face alone would enough to fell any of Tony’s fictional virgins.

“May I do that, Tony? May I ravish you?”

A heartbeat ago, the idea would have seemed ridiculous, but now, godfuckingdamnit, it’s all Tony could ever want.

“Yes.” He sounds breathless. He is. “God, yes, baby. Do whatever you want with me. I’m yours.”

One blink and he’s upright at the edge of the bed; another and his palms are where Steve put them, curled around the jut of Steve’s hips, and his mouth--god, his mouth-- 

“Slowly,” Steve says, his voice soft, his fingers in Tony’s hair not. “Slowly, sweetheart. Just a little bit at a time. You’re not ready to take it all at once.”

_Brigham’s words shook as she did, as he pressed the weight of his manhood over her tongue and in, and in. “I know you think you are. I know that you want to, but your lovely mouth is like your sex; it must be stretched. If I’m to make you feel good, you have to be made ready for me.”_

There’s a sound in Tony’s throat, something desperate, like he’s trapped between laughing or crying. He wants to do both--happy tears, amusement born in a sob--but more than that, goddamnit, he wants to make his pirate come.

 _Heather felt a tremor inside her body. He had only kissed her deeply, had only tugged free her breasts, and already she ached in her secret place, ached for him to touch her the way he had that night in the carriage, her legs in his lap and her skirts pushed up and his fingers, blunt and beautiful, tucked up inside._  

“That’s it.” Steve’s voice is ragged. “That’s good. Oh, god, you’re so lovely.”

_He was hot, her pirate, and hard, as if he had been forged from living steel. She could feel the strain in him, the tremble of his muscles beneath her fingers. It was costing him a lot to stay still._

Steve’s head falls back and he curves his hands around the back of Tony’s head, fingers bumping Tony’s collar and oh, dear fucking god, why is Tony still dressed? Never mind that it yanks his chain, the weird power balance of it all: Steve stripped bare and yet firmly in control. He feels like a new bruise, all colors and swell. God, he wants those hands on him right now, everywhere.

_“Suck, darling.” Brigham could hardly get the words out. “Gently, yes, like that. Now I’m going to move a little. Slide myself in and out of your mouth. Tap my ribs if you don’t like it or if I hurt you, all right? I don’t want to hurt you, my love.”_

“Jesus, I love you, Tony,” Steve says, his voice whipped by the wind. “I knew I did, I knew for so long and I should have told you but fuck, I was terrified. It scares me more than anything in my life, how much I adore you.”

_How was it possible that this man loved her? Heather thought as Brigham’s hips started to pitch, as her heart started to pound. More impossible, still, wasn't it? that she loved him back._

Steve’s fingers on his cheek, beneath his jaw, stroking. “I never had the words for it. I never was any good at telling people how I felt; I always relied on them to say it first. Never had the words for any of it, I guess, until I read yours.” 

And then Steve moans, a noise that tears at the curtains of Tony’s heart, and that little blooming thing is back again, growing, lifting its branches towards the sun of Steve’s face, the affection there, the sweet burn of his eyes. There is a tear in Tony’s now, two, and how his dick can be dripping and his heart feel like Cupid’s, he has no earthly idea. All the people he’s slept with, all the ones that he’s touched, and this, this thing with Steve? It feels brand-spanking-new.

He lifts his head away and fists the hot base of Steve’s cock. “If you come down my throat,” he rasps, “then this won’t actually count as a ravishment, will it? Pretty sure you have to touch me for that.”

“Ravishment?” Steve blinks, his mouth spread open and wet. “I don’t think that’s a real word.”

“It is now. Author’s privilege. Here, hold this.” He wraps Steve’s hand around his own dick, uses his to tear at his tie and finally yank off his coat. His body feels like a boiler.

Steve’s lips lift. “Is it also author’s privilege to cut things off just when they’re getting good?”

“Just? _Just_?” Tony pops open his shirt and fumbles at his belt. “I think I’m insulted. I think we’ve had some good going for a while now. Were you not paying attention?”

This is it, their usual banter--the kind that comes from Saturdays and ball games and lunch during the week, now featuring nudity, and somehow, it feels right. This is it, Tony thinks when his pants hit the floor, when Steve bends down to tug off his shoes. It ain't perfect, it ain't no romance novel, but this is them, their story, whatever they turn out to be.

“Oh, I was paying plenty of attention,” Steve says. He unwinds Tony from his trousers the rest of the way and reaches for the spring in his shorts. “Mmmm. As were you, apparently.”

“One day,” Tony says, “when I’m not ten seconds from coming, you should fuck me.”

That earns him a jerk. “Oh, I should, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You like the idea of me being inside you, don’t you?”

Tony stares at the peek of his head from Steve’s fist. It’s intoxicating. “Uh huh.”

“You brought that up before. When I was sucking you off in your library. How much you wanted me to give it to you.”

“Steve.” There’s an air of desperation, a sudden feeling of weightlessness. Tony fights back a whine. Jesus, already? It’s like he’s virgin who’s never been touched; two minutes of a good man’s knowing hands and he’s ready to burst.

“Yes, Tony?”

Tony pitches forward and wraps that gorgeous, loving face in his hands. Covers Steve’s smile with his own. "Have some mercy on me, you beautiful, infuriating creature, and make me come."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps one more chapter here, I think?


	15. Chapter 15

Later, so much beautiful later, they’re wound together like vines, legs tangled and faces pressed close together, hands spread out over damp skin. The night has slid by like silk through strong fingers and now, they should be sleeping. That’s what Tony’s body is telling him; he feels gloriously drained of every last bit of sense. He needs a shower. He needs a solid eight hours. He needs to never fucking move from this bed.

“So,” Steve says shyly, “should I expect to see this in your next book?”

“See what, baby?”

“This, I guess. Us. Some version of us, anyway.”

Tony nuzzles Steve’s cheek. He can still smell himself there, washcloth be damned. Can still see the way Steve’s face had shattered with the first splatter of heat, the way it had darkened so beautifully with the second.

“Come on,” he’d said, clutching hard at Tony’s ass, his breath coming in big, heavy gasps. “Yes, honey. Let me have all of it.”

There hadn’t been that much left; by then, he’d almost run Tony’s tank dry. But there had been enough to make a mess, which was all Steve needed, apparently, because he’d wrapped one big hand around himself and, with Tony still perched on his chest, still gasping, had thrown his head back and shot come up the curves of Tony’s ass.

“I don’t know.” Now he’s smiling. Now he may never stop smiling. “Maybe. If it was all right with you; if the muse agreed.”

Steve sighs. His grip on Tony tightens. “The muse?”

“The little spark thing, you know. The messenger from the gods who hovers over the keys and pours out words like rose gold.”

A chuckle. “I know what a muse is, Tony.”

“‘Course you do.”

“I didn’t realize you had one, though. I thought…” Steve stops, runs his hand down the meat of Tony’s back. “I don’t know what I thought, honestly. I guess I don’t know how writing like that works.”

“You don’t have a muse, Rogers?”

Steve laughs. “Sure I do. It’s called a deadline. Got a different one every week.”

_Does he know_? Tony wonders. How could he not? Ok, technically, Tony hasn’t said anything. If he’s spent the last two weeks with Tony’s words, his whole ouvre, and he doesn’t see it--is he blind? It’s right there in black and white. “Steve?”

“Hmmm?”

He sits up a little, lifts his head until he can look Steve in the eye. “How in the hell could you read all of my books and not get that I’ve been writing about you?”

“About--?”

“About you. For you, whatever. Do you know what kind of stuff I wrote before I met you?”

Steve’s hand slips up to cup his cheek. “No.”

“Bad shoot-up-’ems. Shit in dark alleys, sometimes a little macabre. Sometimes set up in space. Key point, no romance, no love stories--my characters in those stories? They were almost always two steps from some weird and/or gruesome and/or anatomically impossible death. My muse back then, she wasn’t the happiest gal.”

“Huh.”

“But then I met you and I got to know you, and oh boy, baby, did my muse like you.”

Steve’s lips turn up. His expression is impossibly fond. “She did, huh?”

He tips his face against the heat of Steve’s hand. “Truth be told, Rogers, she’s still pretty damn sweet on you.”

“Yeah?” Another stroke down his back, one that slides over his ass, that sends all kinds of impossible signals to his tired, greedy dick. “Wise lady, your muse. I like her.”

“She’s got bad manners, though.”

“Hmm?”

“She shouldn’t have let me steal from you without permission. Those words, the ones from Peggy. I shouldn’t have stuck them in a story so direct. Not without asking you.”

Steve is quiet for a moment, though his eyes never leave Tony’s face. “I accept your apology,” he says at last. “Thank you.”

Tony curls down, finds the hum of that gorgeous mouth. “No, baby. Thank you.”

“But,” Steve says, “in the end, I’m glad you made them into something better. Gave them a new kind of life. I have to say, I got a little teary when Cam and Drummond finally got together for good.” His lips turn up, a hedge of roses against Tony’s. “They’d sure as hell earned it, I think.”

It’s four o’clock in the morning and Tony Stark’s too old to be awake. He’s been up all night in the arms of a man who adores him, who loves him because of--not in spite of--his mistakes. He drinks too much and he’s spent too much of his life wandering around on his own. Not anymore, though, not after this night. Never again, in all the years yet to come, will he be alone.

And if Steve Rogers has his way, apparently, that means he’ll never sleep again, either.

“Just one more,” Steve says in his ear, those long, clever fingers petting gently at his balls. “I know you’ve got one more in there for me, don’t you?”

Tony’s arms are like rubber, shaking where they’re wound around Steve’s neck. “I’ve got a good ten years on you,” he says. “You know that, right? My body doesn’t work like yours, junior.”

That gets him a growl. “Would you rather play with me, then? I love watching you touch me. It gets me so goddamn hot, Tony.”

Tony’s dick kicks. He may or may not groan. “That’s cheating.”

A smirk he can fucking feel. “What is?”

“Using your words like that. _Oh_. Talking.”

A warm palm covers his cock, doesn’t do much more than squeeze. “You don’t like it when I talk?”

“Did I say that?”

“You implied it. And it’s bullshit.” Steve grins against Tony’s neck, sucks a kiss there, hard and deep. “You love it. For all of your yapping, you’re already stiff.”

Oh god. He is. “I am not.”

“Yeah, you are.”

Tony arches his back, lifts his hips toward the hint of Steve’s fist. “No, I’m--”

They kiss, more a clash of teeth than anything, and then Tony’s flat on his back with Steve above him, grinning like a big, hungry cat. “You are,” Steve says, “so shut up and let me make love to you, all right?”

“God,” Tony says to the ceiling, to the blond crown of Steve’s head as it sink down between the spread of his thighs. “You’re gonna have to carry me downstairs in a few hours. You realize that, right? Or throw me onto a luggage cart or something. _Christ._ ”

Steve looks up, beaming, his hair in his eyes, his cheeks already crimson. “Hey, now. Don’t give me any ideas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sense an epilogue coming. I beg your indulgence.


	16. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added a new last line to the previous chapter, if you are curious. It was niggling at me.

**_His Unexpected Pleasure_** , p. 227-230 [DRAFT] 

_Tildy felt as if she were dreaming._

_Her satin slippers sat firmly on the chapel floor.  Her sister, Amelia, stood beside her, giggling, clutching tightly at the flowers in her arms. Her dress--her mother’s dress, cut so carefully and reshaped so carefully by she and Amelia over these last, dreadful months--clung to her basque and tumbled down her shoulders, its creamy folds falling like seafoam at her feet._

_But it was Richard’s ring upon her finger that told the story loudest and reminded her in those remaining breathless moments after each said_ I do _that this was indeed the day of her wedding, that this was no dream. That the man standing before her, the one refusing to let go of her hand even after he had slipped the band of gold upon it, was no longer solely Richard Davenport, Earl of Hartfell, the person she loved beyond all logic and reason, whom she had loved even after circumstances and old enemies had worked hard to part them. Yes, she had loved him even then._

_And now, he was hers and she was his and no one in London or Kent or Paris could ever separate them again._

_“And now, Your Lordship,” Father Bingley said, cherubic, “you may kiss your bride.”_

~~~

 _She was in his arms before the pastor’s lips stopped moving. In his arms and crushed below his mouth and so warm, his wife. Richard grinned; he felt Tildy’s mouth turn up, too._ His wife _, he thought again, the sweetest sort of marvel._ This exquisite, infuriating woman I hold is my wife.

_He let her go lest he give in to his urges. He wanted to feel her tongue slide over his. He wanted to hear the greedy little sounds she made when he leaned back and opened his mouth and let her have at him. He wanted to stretch out on the sheets of their marital bed and pull her on top of him and feel the soft weight of her breasts shake as she spread her legs and reached back for his--_

_“Husband,” she said, her voice low and amused. “Would you squire me down the aisle and back to the house, sir? Our guests await.”_

_Richard blinked. Heard the happy applause of their neighbors, the squeeze of his wife’s fingers in his hand. Ah, yes. Their guests. Between them and the pleasures of their bed lay propriety. And cake. “Of course, my dear,” he said. He lifted her hand to the crook of his arm. “My very first husbandly duty.”_

_They were at the edge of the vestibule before she responded, their shoes a half step from the cobblestone path. “But not the last one tonight, I think, my darling.” Her dark eyes twinkled in the soft, evening light. “I’ve made a list.”_

 

___________________

  
Tony reaches for his pen. Crosses out _twinkled in the soft, evening light._ Writes _twinkled in the sunset_ instead.

Steve leans over and kisses his shoulder. “Do I want to know what you’re changing?”

“Of course you do. And you will, just as soon as I’m finished reading this through."

The bed sways as Steve inches closer. His knee knocks Tony’s under the covers. “At least tell me if it was one of my lines or one of yours.”

“Hush, dear,” Tony says, recapping his pen, trying to keep his eyes on the page and away from the naked demi-god beside him. Trying. “I’m reading here.”

___________________

 

_The party was far grander than anything the county had seen in years. Everyone within a day’s ride was there: the Sheppards and the Thompsons, the Dillards and the Franklins, the Lyons and the Mattisons, even her mother’s oldest friends, the Benedicts, who’d come all the way from Cornwall--yes, every face in the crowd was happily familiar and the atmosphere jubilant. In all her 27 years, Tildy had never known the house--her father’s once, and now undoubtedly hers--ring with so much laughter and light._

_Which was all very well, wasn’t it, but once the cake had been cut and a second round of wine poured, Tildy Davenport, Lady of Hartfell and of mistress of Elmhurst Hall, had had quite enough. There was a list upstairs, the prospect of a naked and eager husband. Not to mention the soft heat between her thighs that grew more urgent every time her fair-haired, wild husband looked at her. She knew what he was thinking. He knew what she was. It had been a long, long time since they’d enjoyed the luxury of lovemaking, since they had come together in occasions marked as much by leisure as by lust. Paris had been the last time, more than nine months and a lifetime away, and now it seemed to Tildy, surely God and all men would understand why she no longer wanted to wait._

_“Darling,” she said softly, pitching her voice beneath the music and the clink of borrowed glasses, “will you do something for me?”_

_There was a quick storm in Richard’s eyes. He bent his head to meet hers. “Anything you wish.”_

_“Those other husbandly duties I spoke of.”_

_“Yes?”_

_She touched his thigh beneath the table and smiled when he quivered. So sensitive was he, her beast of a man. “I require them, Richard. Will you please take me upstairs?”_

_~~~_

_She said it so simply that it slayed him, stole his breath and sank straight to his cock. And she knew it, his wife, precisely what sort of effect she had on him, always, but especially when she spoke to him thus: half tease, all promise. Bless the Lord above, he thought with a grin, for granting him a woman who knew what she wanted. Still, he couldn’t resist the chance to tease her back; she was a particular kind of pretty when she was riled up._

_“Are you ready for me, Tildy?” he whispered. He nuzzled her cheek. “Could I sink into your softness here and now if I wished? Take you in front of all these fine people and show them one of the hundred thousand reasons that I love you?”_

_She hummed for him softly. “And what’s that?”_

_“Why, how much pleasure you take in receiving me, wife.” He stroked at the skirt of her dress, the fine, light folds. “My fingers, my tongue. The full-length of my manhood. You are so soft when I sink inside you.”_

_“Because you’ve prepared me,” Tildy whispers. He can hear the quick beat of her breathing. “That’s why I get so wet.”_

 

___________________

“Steve.”

“Hmmm?” Steve’s head is on his chest now, his fingers turning like lazy bees over Tony’s belly.

“Heroines don’t talk like this. They don’t use words like _wet_.”

Steve chuckles. “But Tildy’s not like other girls, is she? I thought that was kind of the whole point.”

“Yes, but”--Tony waves the page around--“she’s still a lady. A fictional 19th century lady, sure, but a lady no less. And ladies, no matter how much they enjoy getting fucked by their seemingly-ne’er-do-well-but-actually-a-good-egg handsome suitors, do not as a general rule talk about how wet their cunts are. Not in my book.”

“But maybe,” Steve says, “in _our_ book, they do.”

Tony grins. The pages shake when he laughs. “It is, isn’t it? Ours.”

Steve pinches him, laughs when he yelps. Says: “Oh, how soon they forget.”

“Look, this is due to the editor tomorrow,” Tony says. “The publishing company is already nervous. Imagine how much Lo will go crackers if we’re late turning it in to him. Here's a hint: a whole hell of a lot.”

“Lo will be fine. A little heartburn is good for him.”

“Says the one person in the universe that he’s nice to.”

Steve pinches Tony’s nipple. “Sure, because I treat him like a human being and not a ticking time bomb.”

“Sure. Because you don’t know any better. You’ve never been on the other end of a three AM rant about semi-colon placement. And yes, that has happened. Twice.”

“So,” Steve says. He lifts his head and parks his chin on Tony’s chest. “Go on, then. Read.”

“Thank you.”

“Out loud, though." Those windblown eyes find his and smile. God, that smile. It would stop 10,000 ships. "Why don’t you read it to me?”


	17. Epilogue, cont.

And the funny thing is, Tony realizes months later, standing in the drugstore down the street from his office where they still have lunch together almost every day, it looks as good on the page, that heady mix of his words and Steve’s, as it had sounded when he’d read it out loud, breathless, Steve’s hand on his cock and Steve’s encouragement curling hot and soft in his ear.

“ _He entered her slowly_ ,” he’d read then, he saw in the paperback in his hands, printed in black and white, " _watching her face every second as he asked her to take his great weight_. _There were still flowers in her hair, somehow, tangled among the dark curls, and when she was his fully, she tossed her head and moaned for him and send rose petals tumbling up and over his mouth.”_

Steve had purred, the slide of his fist unceasing. “You’re so pretty when you’re full, honey. I love the way you look at me when I'm inside you, in that instant before we start to fuck."

The page had crunched in Tony’s fist and he’d cursed, cursed and sure as hell raised his hips. “Haven’t you had enough of this yet? Christ. Let me put this fucking thing down.”

“Uh uh.” He’d felt Steve grin against his neck. “You agreed to this.”

“Bullshit. I was tricked.”

That’d earned him a hard squeeze at the base of his dick. “You _agreed_. Get to the end and I’ll let you come.”

So he’d read faster, choppier, lost his place  but Steve had been a man of his word, goddamn him, and held on, made Tony hold strong.

“ _And she thought,_ ” Tony wheezed, a storm of need at the base of his spine, “ _and she--she thought--_ ” 

Steve threw back the covers with his free hand.“What did Tildy think, sweetheart? Don’t stop.”

He’d read, he’d kept reading, even as Steve had slid down his body, rumbling, and replaced his hand with the warm sink of his mouth, and looking back, Tony thinks, shooting a glance at the two young women read greedily beside him at the counter-- _His Unexpected Pleasure_ , the tasteful covers announce, _by Rosamund de Bloom and Orlando Jardin_ \--it’s a miracle Lo, their editor, actually got the manuscript in one piece.

_“She thought,_ ” Tony had stammered as Steve’s tongue climbed up his cock: _this is the person whom I’ve chosen to love._ _It’s a miracle, isn’t it? Because somehow, despite everything--no, because of it; I’m sure of that--he, too, loves me._  
  
_‘Darling,’ Richard said softly, ‘are you going to smile at the moon for the rest of the night?’_

_‘Perhaps.’ She looked over her bare shoulder and saw him smiling up her. ‘Have you some better manner in which to occupy my time?’_

 Steve had chuckled there; the vibration had made Tony shout. Yeah, that one was Steve's. And ok, fine, it was a good line.

 Tony’d gritted his teeth. _“Her husband sat up and reached for her_ ,” he’d gotten out. He'd sounded like he was drunk. " _She fell back with a sigh into the sheets, tussled now from their lovemaking. And very much in danger, she thought with a grin, of being tussled one more time, again._

_‘I shall endeavor to try,’ he said, her husband, the man she loved more than all other in the known world. He slid his fingers between her thighs and met her eyes and stroked the place where she still shimmered with a new sort of damp._

That had made them both groan and Steve’s thumb find Tony’s opening, stretched and dripping with Steve’s spunk.

Steve had raised his head. His mouth was the color of smashed berries. “You think you can take me again, if I let you come like this?”

Tony had nodded and Tony whimpered, and somehow, Tony had eked out the last lines:

" _‘So you must be kind to me, wife, and judge my efforts fairly against the pleasures of making eyes at the moon.’_

_‘Oh,’ she said, throwing her arms around his neck, “Lord Hartfell, I shall do my very best.'"_

“Oh god,” Steve had panted later, the pages safe on the floor, Tony giggling like madman and still speared hard on Steve's cock. “Oh, god. We’re gonna have to do that again.”

“Hey,” Steve says now, sliding up onto the stool beside him. “Sorry I’m late.”

“It’s ok.” Tony gives him a smile and sets aside the book. “Watched some folks get a few pages in.”

“Hmm?”

Tony tips his head down the counter and Steve leans, looks. Comes back with a five-dollar grin.

“Looks like they like it, huh?”

“Well,” Tony says, “they haven’t asked for a refund yet.”

Steve laughs. He reaches over for a menu and his knee bumps Tony’s in a very un-accidental type way. “That’s a good sign, anyway.”

They eat lunch like they always have, trading stories about the office. About Steve’s clients and his cock of a boss, about Tony’s gladhanding and the guy from the Veterans Bureau that Pepper’s penciled in as his two o’clock. Steve eats his BLT neat and Tony destroys his pastrami and the girls down the counter get up one by one with a sigh, leave with dreamy looks on their faces.

And when the hour’s over, Steve picks up his hat and Tony pulls out his sunglasses and they make their way back onto the sidewalk, squinting in the late October heat. But what’s different now is that when Steve claps Tony’s shoulder and says, “See you later?”, Tony can tip his chin up for the kiss that’ll have to wait until after five and say: “Sure. See you at home.”

Except Steve does something different today: he leans down, right there in the middle of everyone. The hand on Tony’s shoulder goes tight.

“I love you,” he says in Tony’s ear. “Don’t forget that between now and supper, all right?”

Tony chuckles. Breathes in the smell of Steve’s aftershave, pictures the bottle that it came from, the blue one, the one that sits on his side of the sink beside his toothbrush and his comb. “Tell you what, Lord Rogers,” Tony says softly, “I'll do my very best."

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those tales that benefited directly from those many kind readers who've commented over the past two weeks--many thanks you all! I hope you're proud of yourselves in helping making this beast more than 20,000 words (?!). If you've had half as much fun reading it as I have writing it, then I think we've all come out all right in this deal. <3


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